LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

%tp. :. fiojt^fl^ifa 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



"READY! AY, READY!" 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE 



The World's Kixg. 

What Were You Made For ? 

' ' Ready ! Ay, Ready ! ' ' 

Christ The Creed. 

Eyery-Day Religion. 

Business a School. 

Employer and Employee. 

The Burden-Bearer. 

Life's Echoes. 

Crooked Things Made Straight. 
Blessed is Death. 

The Great Homestead. 



O 

Philadelphia : 
Historical Publishing Comfany 
1S92, 




Copyright 
By H. S. SMITH, 
1892. 

All rights reserved. 



Press and Bindery 
Historical Publishing Company, 
Philadelphia. 



Contents. 



PAGE. 

Preface 21 

The World's King 25 

What Were You Made For ? 50 

u Ready ! Ay, Ready ! " 60 

Christ The Creed 82 

Every-Day Religion , 99 

Business a School . 119 

Employer and Employee . 139 

The Burden-Bearer 157 

Life's Echoes 175 

Crooked Things Mads Straight 195 

Blessed is Death 200 

The Great Homestead 215 



Preface. 



Dr. Talmage discourses to teeming mil- 
lions ; his audiences are nations. No preach- 
er of this or of any previous age, commands 
or has received that majestic vastness of at- 
tention which accompanies the utterances of 
the Brooklyn divine. His incalculable and 
colossal influence is an exceedingly impressive 
fact in contemporary history. That of Dr. 
Talmage is the most potent voice addressing 
itself to the religious instruction of the people 
to-day ; and the people, in increasing myriads, 
•gladly listen to the message it brings them. 

Nobody cares to know or to inquire what 
is the denomination or church of the world- 
famous preacher, and comparatively few per- 
sons know that the most cheerful and liberal- 
minded of popular divines is a Presbyterian. 
Sufficient it be to know that this man has a 
message to deliver from and in the name of 
the Father of all — a paternal message for the 
unfortunate, for the miserable, for the weary, 
for the sin-laden and no less one for the 
(xxi) 



xxii 



Preface. 



favored, the gay, the revellers in the posses- 
sion of this world's bounties, who need it less 
than those, or think so. His message is for 
everybody his words can reach, in any form 
and in any language — a message simple, 
clear, unmistakable, and delivered with the 
consummate force of rhetoric absolutely nat- 
ural to the messenger. Dr. Talmage in the 
pulpit is a voice intent only upon telling his 
message in the straightest and most effective 
way ; but never preacher more variously in- 
teresting, nor one more captivating, because 
of the striking originality of his powers. All 
that he knows, sees, and experiences utilized 
as material to support his purpose to teach 
the cardinal truths of the Christian religion 
in the most forcible and convincing way, his 
work is characterized by a felicitous variety 
of illustration and reference, and his original 
strength as an orator ' 1 born not made J ' is 
increased with the wealth of his growing 
knowledge and the deep impressions wrought 
by his comprehensive interest in human na- 
ture and affairs. His materials are disposed 
with the strong hand of the master genius. 
The utterances of the man cannot be judged 



Preface. 



xxiii 



of properly by an artificial standard : they 
must be taken as they are — wondrously di- 
versified and unequal, such as only their 
author can speak, and while never failing of 
his purpose to convey his meaning both exact- 
ly and with power, presenting to the admir- 
ation of the most exacting critic, specimens 
not a few of the highest art in expression, the 
more appreciated because so obviously spon- 
taneous and unconscious. 

Circumstances favored the development of 
Dr. Talmage's genius for preaching to the 
people, of whom he is one. He would be 
the last man in the world to cover up what 
indeed he makes avowedly subservient to 
evangelical use — the struggles in life of his 
worthy parents, with small means and much 
sickness of the head of the household ; but 
how excellent the stock and the training 
which gave to the world Dr. Talmage and his 
preaching brothers, these, by the way, all 
good and useful men, above the average of 
ministers in gifts and attainments. Much 
of the domestic pathos and shrewed, homely 
wisdom of the Doctor's preaching is due to 
his early life on the New Jersey farm. 



xxiv 



Preface. 



His religious convictions and experiences 
rest on the simple and comprehensive propo- 
sitions, that man needs a Saviour, and that a 
Saviour has been provided for man's need, 
and one to save all who desire to be saved. 
The infinite love thus adequate to man's 
religious necessities is concerned also with 
fatherly solicitude in all things, in even the 
least thing, which pertain to man now and 
hereafter. Divinely sufficient the provision 
for human well-being and happiness on God's 
side, obedience to the imperative demands 
of moral obligation rests on man, and this ful- 
filled by the community generally there would 
be an end in their certain and easy solution of 
those great problems, social and other, which 
vex the thinker and distress the statesman. 

The addresses to which the reader is intro- 
duced work out an obvious plan in a symmet- 
rical and orderly way. Duty and privilege 
are taught throughout in a manner which ap- 
peals to universal experience. Dr. Talmage 
is at his best in u Ready ! Ay, Ready!" 
which, we believe, will prove to be one of 
his most popular and useful books. 

The Publishers. 



The World'5 Kinq. 



Y ET me tell you in a few minutes the whole 
*^ story of creation. Before we crown 
man we must have a stage on which to crown 
him. I am going to tell you what God did 
in one week. Cosmogony, geology, astronomy, 
ornithology, ichthyology, botany, anatomy, 
are such vast subjects that no human life is 
long enough to explore or comprehend any one 
of them. But I have thought I might in an 
unusual way tell you a little of what God did 
in one week and that the first week. And 
whether you make it a week of days or a week 
of ages, I care not, for I shall reach the same 
practical result of reverence and worship. 

The first Monday morning found swinging 
in space the piled-up lumber of rocks and 
metal and soil and water from which the earth 
was to be builded. God made up His mind to 
(25) 



26 The World's King. 

create a human family and they must have a 
house to live in. But where ? Not a roof, 
not a wall, not a door, not a room was fit for 
human occupancy. There is not a pile of 
black basalt in Yellowstone Park or an ex- 
tinct volcano in Honolulu so inappropriate 
for human residence as was this globe at that 
early period. Moreover, there was no human 
architect to draw a plan, no quarryman to 
blast the foundation stones, no carpenter to 
hew out a beam, and no mason to trowel a 
wall. Poor prospect! But the time was 
coming when a being called man was to be 
constructed and he was to have a bride; and 
where he could find a homestead to which he 
could take her must have been a wonderment 
to angelic intelligences. There had been 
earthquakes enough, and volcanoes enough, 
and glaciers enough, but earthquakes, and 
volcanoes, and glaciers destroy instead of build. 
A worse looking world than this never swung. 
It was heaped up deformities, scarifications, 



The World' s King. 



27 



and monstrosities. The Bible says it was 
without form. That is, it was not round, it 
was not square, it was not octagonal, it was 
not a rhomboid. God never did take any one 
into His counsels, but if He had asked some 
angel about the attempt to turn this planet 
into a place for human residence, the angel 
would have said, u No, no; try some other 
world; the crevices of this earth are too deep; 
its crags are too appalling; its darkness is too 
thick." But Monday morning came. I 
think it was a spring morning and about half 
past four o'clock. The first thing needed was 
light. It was not needed for God to work by, 
for He can work as well in the darkness. But 
light may be necessary, for angelic intelli- 
gences are to see in its full glory the process 
of world-building. But where are the candles, 
where are the candelabra, where is the chan- 
delier ? No rising sun will roll in the morn- 
ing, for if the sun is already created its light 
will not yet reach the earth in three days. No 



28 



The World } s King. 



moon or stars can brighten this darkness. The 
moon and stars are not born yet, or, if created, 
their light will not reach the earth for some 
time yet. But there is need of immediate 
light. Where shall it come from ? Desiring 
to account for things in a natural way you say, 
and reasonably say, that heat and electricity 
throw out light independently of the sun, and 
that the metallic bases throw out light inde- 
pendently of the sun, and that alkalies throw 
out light independently of the sun. Oh, yes; 
all that is true, but I do not think that this is 
the way light was created. The record makes 
me think that, standing over this earth that 
spring morning, God looked upon the dark- 
ness that palled the heights of this world, and 
the chasms of it, and the awful reaches of it, 
and uttered, whether in the Hebrew of earth, 
or some language celestial I know not, that 
word which stands for the subtle, bright, 
glowing, and all-pervading fluid, that word 
which thrills and garlands and lifts everything 



The World's King. 



29 



it touches, that word the full meaning of 
which all the chemists of the ages have busied 
themselves in exploring, that word which 
suggests a force that flies one hundred and 
ninety thousand miles in a second, and by un- 
dulations seven hundred and twenty-seven 
trillions in a second, that one word God utters 
— Light! And instantly the darkness began 
to shimmer, and the thick folds of blackness 
to lift, and there were scintillations, and corus- 
cations, and flashes, and a billowing up of re- 
splendence, and in great sheets it spread out 
Northward, Southward, Eastward, Westward, 
and a radiance filled the atmosphere until it 
could hold no more of the brilliance. Light 
now to work by while supernatural intelli- 
gences look on. Light, the first chapter of 
the first day of the week. Light, the joy of 
all the centuries. Light, the greatest bless- 
ing that ever touched the human eye. The 
robe of the Almighty is woven out of it, for 
He covers Himself with light as with a gar- 
ment. Oh! blessed light! 



30 



The World's King. 



I am so glad this was the first thing created 
that week. Good thing to start every week 
with is light. That will make our work easier. 
That will keep our disposition more radiant. 
That will hinder even our losses from becom- 
ing too sombre. Give us more light, natural 
light, intellectual light, spiritual light, ever- 
lasting light. For lack of it the body stum- 
bles and the soul stumbles. Oh, thou Father 
of Lights, give us light! The great German 
philosopher in his last moment said, ' ' I want 
more light. " A minister of Christ recently 
dying cried out in exultation, ' ' I move into 
the light! " Mr. Toplady, the immortal 
hymnologist, in his expiring moments ex- 
claimed, u Light! Light! " Heaven itself is 
only more light. Upon all superstition, upon 
all ignorance, upon all sorrow, let in the light. 
But now the light of the first Monday is re- 
ceding. The blaze is going out. The colors 
are dimming. Only part of the earth's sur- 
face is visible. It is six o' clock, seven o' clock, 



The World' } s King. 



31 



eight o'clock; obscuration and darkness. It 
is Monday night. 1 1 And the evening and 
the morning were the first day." 

Now it is Tuesday morning. A delicate 
and tremendous undertaking is set apart for 
this day. There was a great superabundance 
of water. God by the wave of His hand this 
morning gathers part of it in suspended reser- 
voirs and part of it He orders down into the 
rivers, and lakes, and seas. How to hang 
whole Atlantic Oceans in the clouds without 
their spilling over, except in right quantities 
and at right times, was an undertaking that 
no one but Omnipotence would have dared. 
But God does it as easily as you would lift a 
glass of water. There He hoists two clouds 
each thirty miles wide and five miles high, and 
balances them. Here He lifts the cirrus 
clouds and spreads them out in great white 
banks as though it had been snowing in 
heaven. And the cirro-stratus clouds in long 
parallel lines so straight you know an infinite 



32 



The World' s King, 



geometer has drawn them. Clouds which are 
the armory from which thunder storms get 
their bayonets of fire. Clouds which are 
oceans on the wing. No wonder, long after 
this first Tuesday of Creation week, Elihu 
confounded Job with the question, 4 ' Dost 
thou know the balancings of the clouds ? ' ' 
Half of this Tuesday work done, the other 
half is the work of compelling the waters to 
lie down in their destined places. So God 
picks up the solid ground and packs it up 
into five elevations which are the continents. 
With His finger He makes deep depressions 
in them, and these are the lakes, while at the 
piling up of the Alleghenies and Sierra 
Nevadas and Pyrenees and Alps and Hima- 
layas the rest of the waters start by the law of 
gravitation to the low^er places, and in their 
run down-hill become the rivers, and then all 
around the earth these rivers come into con- 
vention and become oceans beneath, as the 
clouds are oceans above. How soon the rivers 



The World s King. 



33 



got to their places when God said, " Hudson 
and James and Amazon, down to the Atlantic; 
Oregon and Sacramento down to the Pacific. ' ' 
Three-quarters of the earth being water and 
only one-quarter being land, nothing but 
Almightiness could have caged the three- 
fourths so that they could not devour the one- 
fourth. Thank God for water and plenty of 
it. What a hint that God would have the 
human race very clean : three-fourths of the 
w r orld water. Pour it through the homes and 
make them pure. Pour it through the prisons 
and make their occupants moral. Pour it 
through the streets and make them healthy, 
There are several thousand people asleep in 
Greenwood, who, but for the filthy streets of 
Brooklyn and New York, would have been 
to-day well and in churches. Moreover, there 
never was a filthy street that remained a moral 
street. How important an agency of reform 
water is, was illustrated by the fact that when 
the ancient world got outrageously wicked, it 
3 



34 



The World' s King. 



was plunged into the Deluge and kept under 
for months till its iniquity was soaked out of 
it. But I rejoice that on the first Tuesday of 
the world's existence the water was taught to 
know its place, and the Mediterranean lay 
down at the feet of Europe, and the Gulf of 
Mexico lay down at the feet of North America, 
and Geneva lay down at the feet of the Alps, 
and Scroon L,ake fell to sleep in the lap of the 
Adirondacks. u And the evening and the 
morning were the second day." 

Now it is Wednesday morning of the world's 
first week. Gardening and horticulture will 
be born to-day. How queer the hills look, 
and so unattractive they seem hardly worth 
having been made. But now all the surfaces 
are changing color. Something beautiful is 
creeping all over them. It has the color of 
emerald. Ay, it is herbage. Hail to the 
green grass, God's favorite color and God's 
favorite plant, as I judge from the fact that 
He makes a larger number of them than of 



The World's King, 



35 



anything else. But look yonder! Something 
starts out of the ground and goes higher up, 
higher and higher, and spreads out broad 
leaves. It is a palm tree. Yonder is another 
growth, and its leaves hang far down, and it 
is a willow tree. And yonder is a growth 
with mighty sweep of branches. And here 
they come — the pear and the apple, and the 
peach and the pomegranate, and groves and 
orchards and forests, their shadows and their 
fruit girdling the earth. We are pushing 
agriculture and fruit culture to great excel- 
lence in the nineteenth century, but we have 
nothing now to equal what I see on this first 
Wednesday of the world's existence. I take 
a taste of one of the apples this Wednesday 
morning, and I tell you it mingles in its juices 
all the flavors of Spitzbergen and Newtown 
pippin and Rhode Island greening and Dan- 
vers winter sweet and Roxbury russet and 
Hubbardston none such, but added to all, and 
overpowering all other flavors is the Paradis- 



36 



The World's King. 



iacal juice that all the orchards of the nine- 
teenth century fail to reach. I take a taste 
of the pear, and it has all the luxury of the 
three thousand varieties of the nineteenth 
century ; all the Seckel and the Bartlett of the 
pomological gardens of later times, an 
acridity compared with it. And the grapes! 
Why, this one cluster has in it the richness 
of whole vineyards of Catawbas and Concords 
and Isabellas. Fruits of all colors, of all 
odors, of all flavors. No hand of man yet 
made to pluck it or tongue to taste it. The 
banquet for the human race is being spread 
before the arrival of the first guest. In the 
fruit of that garden was the seed for the or- 
chards and gardens of the Hemispheres. 
Notice that the first thing that God made for 
food was fruit, and plenty of it. Slaughter 
houses are of later invention. Far am I from 
being a vegetarian, but an almost exclusive 
meat diet is depraving. Savages confine them- 
selves almost exclusively to animal food, and 



The World's King. 



37 



that is one reason that they are savages. Give 
your children more apples and less mutton. 
The world will have to give dominance to the 
fruit diet of Paradise before it gets back to the 
morals of Paradise. May God's blessing come 
down on the orchards and vineyards of 
America, and keep back the frosts and the 
curculio. But we must not forget that it is 
Wednesday evening in Eden, and upon that 
perfect fruit of those perfect trees let the 
curtain drop. ' 4 And the evening and the 
morning were the third day. ' ' 

Now it is Thursday morning of the world's 
first week. Nothing will be created to-day. 
The hours will be passed in scattering fogs and 
mists and vapors. The atmosphere must be 
swept clean. Other worlds are to hove in 
sight. This little ship of the earth has seemed 
to have all the ocean of immensity to itself. 
But mightier craft are to be hailed to-day on 
the high seas of space. First, the moon's 
white sail appears and does very well until 



38 



The World's King. 



the sun bursts upon the scene. The light 
that on the previous three mornings was struck 
from an especial word now gathers in the sun, 
moon, and stars. One for the day the others 
for the night. It seemed as if they all had 
been created within twenty-four hours. Ah, 
this is a great time in the world's first week. 
The moon, the nearest neighbor to our earth, 
appears, her photograph to be taken in the 
nineteenth century, when the telescope shall 
bring her within one hundred and twenty 
miles of New York. And the sun now appears, 
afterward to be found eight hundred and 
eighty-eight thousand miles in diameter, and, 
put in astronomical scales, to be found to 
weigh nearly four hundred thousand times 
heavier than our earth; a mighty furnace, its 
heat kept up by meteors pouring into it as 
fuel, a world devouring other worlds with its 
jaws of flame. And the stars come out, those 
street lamps of heaven, those keys of pearl, 
upon which God's fingers play the music of 



The World's King. 



39 



the spheres. How bright they look on this Ori- 
ental evening. Constellations! Galaxies! What 
a twenty-four hours of this first week — solar, 
lunar, stellar appearances. All this Thurs- 
day and the adjoining nights employed in 
pulling aside the curtain of vapor from these 
flushed or pale-faced worlds. Enough ! 4 1 And 
the evening and the morning were the fourth 
day." 

Now it is Friday morning in the first week 
of the world's existence. Water, but not a 
fin swimming it ; air, but not a wing flying it 
It is a silent world. Can it be that it was 
made only for vegetables ? But, hark ! There 
is a swirl and a splashing in all the four rivers 
of Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. 
Thev are all a-swini with life, some darting- 
like arrows through split crystal, and others 
quiet in dark pools like shadows. Every- 
thing, from spotted trout to behemoth; all 
colored, all shaped, the ancestors of finny 
tribes that shall by their wonders of construe- 



40 



The World's King. 



tion confound the Agassizs, the Cuviers, and 
the Linnseuses, and the ichthyologists of the 
more than six thousand years following this 
Friday of the first week. And while I stand 
on the banks of these Paradisiacal rivers 
watching these finny tribes, I hear a whirr in 
the air, and I look up and behold wings — 
wings of larks, robins, doves, eagles, flamin- 
goes, albatrosses, brown threshers. Creatures 
of all color, blue as if dipped in the skies, 
fiery as if they had flown out of the sunsets, 
golden as if they had taken their morning 
bath in buttercups. And while I am study- 
ing the colors, they begin to carol and chirp 
and coo and twitter and run up and down the 
scales of a music that they must have heard 
at heaven's gate. Yes. I find them in Para- 
dise on this the first Friday afternoon of the 
world's existence. And I sit down on the 
bank of the Euphrates, and the murmur of 
the river, together with the chant of birds in 
the sky, puts me into a state of somnolence. 



The World' s King. 



41 



4 4 And the evening and the morning were the 
fifth day." 

Now it is Saturday morning of the world's 
first week and with this day the week closes. 
But oh, what a climacteric day! The air has 
its population and the water its population. 
Yet the land has not one inhabitant. But 
here they come, by the voice of God created! 
Horses grander than those which in after 
time Job will describe as having neck clothed 
with thunder. Cattle enough to cover a 
thousand hills. Sheep shepherded by Him 
who made for them the green pastures. Cat- 
tle superior to the Alderneys and Ayrshires 
and Devonshires of after times. Leopards so 
beautiful, we are glad they cannot change 
their spots. Lions without their fierceness, 
and all the quadruped world, so gentle, so 
sleek, so perfect. I^ook out how you treat 
this animal creation, whether they walk the 
earth or swim the waters or fly the air. Do you 
not notice that God gave them precedence of 



42 



The World's King. 



the human race ? They were created Friday 
and Saturday mornings, as man was created 
Saturday afternoon. They have a right to be 
here. He who galls a horse, or exposes a cow 
to the storm, or beats a dog, or mauls a cat, 
or gambles at the pigeon-shooting, or tortures 
an insect, will have to answer for it in the 
Judgment Day. You may console yourself 
that these creatures are not immortal and they 
cannot appear against you, but the God who 
made these creatures and who saw the wrong 
you did them, will be there. Better look out, 
you stock-raisers and railroad companies who 
bring the cattle on trains without food or 
water for three or four days in hot weather, a 
long groan of agony from Omaha to New 
York. Better look out, you farmer riding be- 
hind that limping horse with a nail that the 
blacksmith drove into the quick. Better look 
out, you boys stoning bull frogs, and turning 
turtles upside down, and robbing birds' 
nests. 



The World' s King. 



43 



But something is wanting in Paradise and 
the week is almost done. Who is there to 
pluck the flowers of this Edenic lawn ? Who 
is there to command these worlds of quadruped 
and fish and bird ? For whom has God put 
back the curtain from the face of sun and 
moon and star ? The world wants an emperor 
and empress. It is Saturday afternoon. No 
one but the Lord Almighty can originate a 
human being. In the world where there are 
in the latter part of the nineteenth century 
over fourteen hundred million people, a human 
being is not a curiosity. But how about the 
first human eye that was ever kindled, the 
first human ear that was ever opened, the first 
human lung that ever breathed, the first 
human heart that ever beat, the first human 
life ever constructed? That needed the 
origination of a God. He had no model to 
work by. What stupendous work for a Satur- 
dav afternoon. He must originate a style of 
human heart through which all the blood in 



44 



The World' s King. 



the body must pass every three minutes. He 
must make that heart so strong that it can 
during each day lift what would be equal to 
one hundred and twenty tons of weight, and it 
must be so arranged as to beat over thirty-six 
million times every year. About five hun- 
dred muscles must be strung in the right 
place, and at least two hundred and fifty bones 
constructed. Into this body must be put at 
least nine million nerves. Over three thou- 
sand perspiring pores must be made for every 
inch of fleshly surface. The human voice 
must be so constructed it shall be capable of 
producing seventeen trillion five hundred and 
ninety-two billion one hundred and eighty-six 
million forty-four thousand four hundred and 
fifteen sounds. But all this the most in- 
significant part of the human being. The 
soul. Ah, the construction of that God Him- 
self would not be equal to if He were any the 
less of a God. Its understanding, its will, its 
memory, its conscience, its capacities of en- 



The World's King. 



45 



joyment or suffering, its immortality. What 
a work for a Saturday afternoon. Ay! Be- 
fore night there were to be two such human 
and yet immortal beings constructed. The 
woman as well as the man was formed Satur- 
day afternoon. Because a deep sleep fell 
upon Adam and by divine surgery a portion 
of his side was removed for the nucleus of an- 
other creation, it has been supposed that per- 
haps days and nights passed between the 
masculine and feminine creations. But no! 
Adam was not three hours unmated. If a 
physician can by anaesthetics put one into a 
deep sleep in three minutes, God certainly 
could have put Adam into a profound sleep in 
a short while that Saturday afternoon and 
made the deep and radical excision without 
causing distress. By a manipulation of the 
dust, the same hand that moulded the moun- 
tains moulded the features and moulded the 
limbs of the father of the human race. But 
his eyes did not see, and his nerves did not 



46 



The World's King. 



feel 4 and his muscles did not move, and his 
lungs did not breathe, and his heart did not 
pulsate. A perfect form he lay along the 
earth, symmetrical and of God-like counten- 
ance. Magnificent piece of divine carpentry 
and omnipotent sculpturing, but no vitality. 
A body without a soul. Then the source of 
all life stooped to the inanimate nostril and 
lip, and, as many a skilful and earnest physi- 
cian has put his lips to a patient in comatose 
state and breathed into his mouth and nostril 
and at the same time compressed the lungs, 
until that which was artificial respiration be- 
came natural respiration, so methinks God 
breathed into this cold sculpture of a man the 
breath of life, and the heart begins to tramp, 
and the lungs to inhale, and the eyes to open, 
and the entire form to thrill, and with the 
rapture of a life just come, the prostrate being 
leaps to his feet — a man! But the scene of 
this Saturday is not yet done, and in the at- 
mosphere, drowsy with the breath of flowers, 



The World's King. 



47 



and the song of bobolinks and robin-red- 
breasts, the man slumbers, and by anaesthetics, 
divinely administered, the slumber deepens 
until without the oozing of one drop of blood 
at the time, or the faintest scar afterward, that 
portion is removed from his side which is to 
be built up the Queen of Paradise, the daugh- 
ter of the great God, the mother of the human 
race, the benediction of all ages, woman the 
wife, afterward woman the mother. And as 
the two join hands and stroll down along the 
banks of the Euphrates toward a bower of 
mignonette and wild rose and honeysuckle, 
and are listening to the call of the whip- 
poor-will from the aromatic thickets, the sun 
sinks beneath the horizon. 4 1 And the even- 
ing and the morning were the sixth day." 

What do you think of that one week's 
work ? I review it not for entertainment, but 
because I would have you join in David's 
Doxology: " Great and marvelous are Thy 
works, Lord God Almighty; M because I want 



48 



The World's King. 



you to know what a homestead our Father 
built for His children at the start, though sin 
has despoiled it; and because I want you to 
know how the world will look again when 
Christ shall have restored it, swinging now 
between two Edens; because I want you to 
realize something of what a mighty God He 
is and the utter folly, of trying to war against 
Him; because I want you to make peace with 
this chief of the universe through the Christ 
who mediates between offended omnipotence 
and human rebellion; because I want you to 
know how fearfully and wonderfully you are 
made, your body as well as your soul an 
omnipotent achievement; because I want you 
to realize that order reigns throughout the 
universe, and that God's watches tick to the 
second, and that His clocks strike regularly, 
though they strike once in a thousand years. 
A learned man once asked an old Christian 
man who had no advantages of schooling, why 
he believed there was a God, and the good old 



The World's King 



49 



man, who probably had never heard an argu- 
ment on the subject in all his life, made this 
noble reply : * * Sir, I have been here going 
hard upon fifty years. Every day since I have 
been in this world I see the sun rise in the 
East and set in the West. . The North Star 
stands where it did the first time I saw it; the 
Seven Stars and Job's Orion keep on the same 
path in the sky and never turn out. It isn't 
so with man's work. He makes clocks and 
watches; they may run well for a while, but 
they get out of fix and stand stock still. But 
the sun and the moon and stars keep on this 
same way all the while. The heavens declare 
the glory of God." Yea, I speak this, be- 
cause I want you to walk in appreciation of 
Addison's sublime sentiment when he writes: 

The spacious firmament on high, 
With all the blue ethereal sky, 
And spangled heav'ns, a shining frame, 
Their great Original proclaim. 

In reason's ear they all rejoice, 
And utter forth a glorious voice ; 
For ever singing, as they shine, 
"The hand that made us is divine.' ' 

4 



What Were You Made Tor ? 



'TTHERE is too much divine skill shown in 
* the physical, mental, and moral constitu- 
tion of the ordinary human being to suppose 
that he was constructed without any divine 
purpose. If you take me out on some vast 
plain and show me a pillared temple sur- 
mounted by a dome like St. Peter's, and hav- 
ing a floor of precious stones, and arches that 
must have taxed the brain of the greatest 
draughtsman to design, and walls scrolled and 
niched and paneled and wainscoted and 
painted, and I should ask you what this build- 
ing was put up for, and you answered, 4 1 For 
nothing at all," how could I believe you? 
And it is impossible for me to believe that any 
ordinary human being who has in his muscu- 
lar, nervous, and cerebral organization more 
wonders than Christopher Wren lifted in St. 
(50) 



What Were You Made For? 51 



Paul's, or Phidias ever chiseled on the Acro- 
polis, and built in such a way that it shall 
last long after St. PauPs Cathedral is as 
much a ruin as the Parthenon — that such a 
being was constructed for no purpose, and to 
execute no mission, and without any divine 
intention toward some end. I wish to help 
you to find out what you are made for, and 
help you find your sphere, and assist you into 
that condition where you can say with cer- 
tainty and emphasis and enthusiasm and tri- 
umph : u To this end was I born. n 

I discharge you from all responsibility for 
most of your environments. You are not re- 
sponsible for your parentage, or grand-parent- 
age. You are not responsible for any of the 
cranks that may have lived in your ancestral 
line, and who a hundred years before you were 
born may have lived a style of life that more or 
less affects you to-day. You are not respon- 
sible for the fact that your temperament is 
sanguine, or melancholic, or bilious, or lym- 



52 What Were You Made For? 



phatic, or nervous. Neither are you respon- 
sible for the place of your nativity, whether 
among the granite hills of New England, or 
the cotton plantations of Louisiana, or on the 
banks of the Clyde, or the Dnieper, or the 
Shannon, or the Seine. Neither are you re- 
sponsible for the religion taught in your 
father's house, or the irreligion. Do not 
bother yourself about what you cannot help, 
or about circumstances that you did not de- 
cree. Take things as they are, and decide 
the question so that you shall be able safely to 
say, u To this end was I born." How will 
you decide it ? By direct application to the 
only Being in the universe who is competent 
to tell you — the Lord Almighty. Do you 
know the reason why He is the only one who 
can tell? Because He can see everything 
between your cradle and your grave, though 
the grave be eighty years off. And besides 
that, He is the only being who can see what 
has been happening for the last five hundred 



What Were You Made For? 



53 



years in your ancestral line, and for thousands 
of years clear back to Adam, and there is not 
one person in all that ancestral line of six 
thousand years but has somehow affected your 
character, and even old Adam himself will 
sometimes turn up in your disposition. The 
only Being who can take all things that per- 
tain to you into consideration is God, and He 
is the one you can ask. Life is so short we 
have no time to experiment with occupations 
and professions. The reason we have so 
many dead failures is that parents decide for 
children what they shall do, or children them- 
selves, wrought on by some whim or fancy, 
decide for themselves without any imploration 
of divine guidance. So we have now in pul- 
pits men making sermons who ought to be in 
blacksmith shops making plowshares, and we 
have in the law r those who instead of ruining 
the cases of their clients ought to be pounding 
shoe lasts, and doctors who are the worst hin- 
drances to their patients' convalescence, and 



54 What Were You Made For? 



artists trying to paint landscapes who ought 
to be whitewashing board fences ; while there 
are others making bricks who ought to be re- 
modeling constitutions, or shoving planes who 
ought to be transforming literatures, Ask God 
about what worldly business you shall under- 
take until you are so positive you can in earn- 
estness smite your hand on your plow handle, 
or your carpenter's bench, or your Black- 
stone's Commentaries, or your medical dic- 
tionary, or your Doctor Dick's Didactic The- 
ology, saying, u Por this end was I born." 

There are children who early develop natural 
affinities for certain styles of work. When the 
father of the astronomer Forbes was going to 
London, he asked his children what present 
he should bring each one of them. The 
boy who was to be an astronomer, cried out, 
' i Bring me a telescope ! ' ' And there are 
children whom you find all by themselves 
drawing on their slates, or on paper, ships or 
houses or birds, and you know they are to be 



What Were You Made For? 55 



draughtsmen or artists of some kind. And 
you find others ciphering out difficult problems 
with rare interest and success, and you know 
they are to be mathematicians. And others 
making wheels and strange contrivances, and 
you know they are going to be machinists. 
And others are found experimenting with hoe 
and plow and sickle, and you know they will 
be farmers. And others are always swapping 
jack-knives or balls or bats and making some- 
thing by the bargain, and they are going to 
be merchants. When Abbe de Ranee had so 
advanced in studying Greek that he could 
translate Anacreon at tw r elve years of age, 
there was no doubt left that he was intended 
for a scholar. But in almost every lad there 
comes a time when he does not know what he 
was made for, and his parents do not know, 
and it is a crisis that God only can decide. 
Then there are those born for some especial 
work, and their fitness does not develop until 
quite late. When Philip Doddridge, whose 



56 What Were You Made For? 



sermons and books have harvested uncounted 
souls for glory, began to study for the min- 
istry, Dr. Calamy, one of the wisest and best 
men, advised him to turn his thoughts to some 
other work. Isaac Barrow, the eminent cler- 
gyman and Christian scientist — his books 
standard now though he has been dead over 
two hundred years — was the disheartenment 
of his father, who used to say that if it pleased 
God to take any of his children away he 
hoped it might be his son Isaac. So some of 
those who have been characterized for their 
stupidity in boyhood or girlhood, have turned 
out the mightiest benefactors or benefactresses 
of the human race. These things being so, 
am I not right in saying that in many cases 
God only knows what is the most appropriate 
thing for you to do, and He is the one to ask ? 
And let all parents, and all schools, and all 
universities, and all colleges recognize this, 
and a large number of those who spent their 
best years in stumbling about among busi- 



Wliat Were You Made Far? 57 



nesses and occupations, now trying this and 
now trying that, and failing in all, would be 
able to go ahead with a definite, decided and 
tremendous purpose, saying, c 1 To this end 
was I born." 

But my subject now mounts into the mo- 
mentous. Ivet me say that you are made for 
usefulness and heaven. I judge this from 
the way you are built. You go into a shop 
where there is only one w r heel turning and 
that by a workman's foot on a treadle, and 
you say to yourself, " Here is something good 
being done, yet on a smaller scale; n but if you 
go into a factory covering man}' acres, and 
you find thousands of bands pulling on thous- 
ands of wheels, and shuttles flying, and the 
whole scene bewildering with activities, driven 
by water, or steam, or electric power, you con- 
clude that the factory was put up to do great 
work and on a vast scale. Now, I look at 
you, and if I should find that you had only 
one faculty of body, only one muscle, only 



58 What Were You Made For? 



one nerve, if you could see but could not 
hear, or could hear and not see, if you had 
the use of only one foot or one hand, and, as 
to your higher nature, if you had only one 
mental faculty, and you had memory but no 
judgment, or judgment but no will, and if 
you had a soul with only one capacity, I 
would say not much is expected of you. But 
stand up, O man, and let me look you 
squarely in the face. Eyes capable of seeing 
everything. Ears capable of hearing every- 
thing. Hands capable of grasping every- 
thing. Mind with more wheels than any fac- 
tory ever turned, more power than Corliss 
engine ever moved. A soul that will out- 
live all the universe except heaven, and 
would outlive all heaven if the life of other 
immortals were a moment short of the eter- 
nal. Now, what has the world a right to ex- 
pect of you ? What has God a right to demand 
of you? God is the greatest of economists 
in the universe, and he makes nothing use- 



What Were You Made Forf 59 



lessly, and for what purpose did lie build your 
body, mind, and soul as they are built ? There 
are only two beings in the universe who can 
answer that question. The angels do not 
know. The schools do not know. Your 
kindred cannot certainly know. God knows, 
and you ought to know. A factory running 
at an expense of $500,000 a year, and turning 
out goods worth seventy cents a year would 
not be such an incongruity as you, O man, 
with such semi-infinite equipment doing 
nothing, or next to nothing, in the way of 
usefulness. ( ( What shall I do ? n you ask. 
My brethren, my sisters, do not ask me. Ask 
God. There's some path of Christian useful- 
ness open. It may be a rough path, or it 
may be a smooth path, a long path, or a short 
path. It may be on a mount of conspicuity, 
or in a valley unobserved, but it is a path on 
which you can start with such faith and such 
satisfaction and such certainty that you can 
cry out in the face of earth and hell and 
heaven, u To this end was I born. n 



" Ready i Ay, Ready i" 



HAT are the causes of laziness and what 
are its evil results ? I knew a man who 
was never up to time. It seemed impossible 
for him to meet an engagement. When he 
was to be married he missed the train. His 
watch seemed to take on the habits of its 
owner, and was always too slow. He had a 
constitutional lethargy for which he did not 
seem responsible. So indolence often arises 
from the natural temperament. I do not 
know but there is a constitutional tendency 
to this vice in every man. However active 
you may generally be, have you not on some 
warm spring day felt a touch of this feeling 
on you, although you may have shaken it off 
as you would a reptile ? But some are so pow- 
erfully tempted to this by their bodily consti- 
tution that all the work of their life has been 
accomplished with this lethargy hanging on 
their back or treading on their heels. 

(60) 




' Ready ! Ay, Ready ! ' ' 61 



You sometimes behold it in childhood. The 
child moping and lounging within doors while 
his brothers and sisters are at play, or if he 
join them he is behind in every race and 
beaten in every game. His nerves, his mus- 
cles, his bones are smitten with this palsy. 
He vegetates rather than lives, creeps rather 
than walks, yawns rather than breathes. The 
animal in his nature is stronger than the in- 
tellectual. He is generally a great eater and 
active only when he cannot digest what he 
has eaten. It requires as much effort for 
him to walk as for others to run. Languor 
and drowsiness are his natural inheritance. 
He is built for a slow sailing vessel, a heavy 
hulk and an insufficient cutwater. Place an 
active man in such a bodily structure and the 
latter would be shaken to pieces in one day. 
Every law of physiology demands that he be 
supine. Such a one is not responsible for this 
powerful tendency of his nature. His great 
duty is resistance. 



62 "Ready! Ay, Ready!' 



When I see a man fighting an unfortunate 
temperament all my sympathies are aroused, 
and I think of Victor Hugo's account of a 
scene on a warship, where, in the midst of a 
storm at sea, a great cannon got loose, and it 
was crashing this way and that and would 
have destroyed the ship; and the chief gunner, 
at the almost certain destruction of his own 
life, rushed at it with a handspike to thrust 
between the spokes of the wheel of the roll- 
ing cannon, and by a fortunate leverage ar- 
rested the gun till it could be lashed fast. But 
that struggle did not seem so disheartening as 
that man enters upon who attempts to fight 
his natural temperament, whether it be too 
fast or too slow, too nervous or too lymphatic. 
God help him, for God only can. 

Indolence is often the result of easy cir- 
cumstances. Rough experience in earlier life 
seems to be necessary in order to make a man 
active and enterprising. Mountaineers are 
nearly always swarthy, and those who have 



' ' Ready ! Ay, Ready !" 63 



toiled among mountains of trouble get the 
most nerve and muscle and brain. Those 
who have become the deliverers of nations, 
once had not where to lay their heads. Lo- 
custs and wild honey have been the fare of 
many a John the Baptist, while those who 
have been fondled of fortune and petted and 
praised have often grown up lethargic. 

They have none of that heroism which 
comes from fighting one's own battles. The 
warm summer sun of prosperity has weakened 
and relaxed them. Born among the luxuries 
of life exertion has been unnecessary, and 
therefore they spend their time in taking it 
easy. They may enter into business, but they 
are unfitted for its application, its hardships, 
for its repulses, and after having lost the most 
of that which they have invested, go back to 
thorough inaction. This costly yacht may do 
well enough on the smooth, glassy bay, but 
cannot live an hour amid a chopping sea. 

Another cause of indolence is severe dis- 



64 "Ready! Ay, Ready!" 



couragement There are those around us 
who started life with the most sanguine ex- 
pectation. Their enterprise excited the re- 
mark of all compeers. But some sudden and 
overwhelming misfortune met them, and 
henceforth they have been inactive. Trouble, 
instead of making them more determined, 
has overthrown them. They have lost all 
self-reliance. They imagine that all men and 
all occurrences are against them. They hang 
their heads where once they walked upright. 
They never look you up in the eyes. They 
become misanthropic and pronounce all men 
liars and scoundrels. They go melancholic and 
threadbare to their graves. You cannot rouse 
them to action by the most glittering offer. 

In most cases these persons have been hon- 
orable and upright all their lives, for rogues 
never get discouraged, as there is always some 
other plot they have not laid and some other 
trap they have not sprung. There are but 
few sadder sights than a man of talent and 



4 1 Ready / Ay, Ready / " 65 



tact and undoubted capacity giving up life as 
a failure, like a line of magnificent steamers 
rotting against wharves, from which they 
ought to have been carrying the exportations 
of a nation. Every great financial panic pro- 
duces a large crop of such men. In the great 
establishments where they were partners in 
business they are now weighers or draymen or 
clerks on small salary. 

Reverie is also a cause for indolence. There 
are multitudes of men who expect to achieve 
great success in life, who are entirely unwill- 
ing to put forth any physical, moral, or intel- 
lectual effort. They have a great many elo- 
quent theories of life. They are all the while 
expecting something to turn up. They pass 
their life in dreaming. They have read in 
light literature how men suddenly and unex- 
pectedly came to large estates, or found a pot 
of buried gold at the foot of the rainbow of 
Good Luck, or had some great offer made 
them. They have passed their lives in reverie. 
5 



66 < ' Ready I Ay, Ready ! ' ' 



Notwithstanding he is pinched with pover- 
ty and any other man would be downcast at 
the forlorn prospect, he is always cheerful 
and sanguine and jovial, for he does not know 
but that he may be within a day or two of 
astounding success. You cannot but be en- 
tertained with his cheerfulness of temper. 
All the world wishes him well, for he never 
did anybody any harm. At last he dies in 
just the same condition in which he lived, 
sorrowful only because he must leave the 
world just at the time when his long thought 
of plans were about to be successful. 

Let no young man begin life with reverie. 
There is nothing accomplished without hard 
work. Do not in idleness expect something 
to turn up. It will turn down. Indolence 
and wickedness always make bad luck. These 
people of reverie are always about to begin. 
They say, " Wait a little.^ So with the child 
who had a cage containing a beautiful canary, 
and the door of the cage was open, and a cat 



11 Ready ! Ay, Ready!" 67 



was in the room. u Better shut the door of the 
cage/' said the mother. u Wait a minute, M 
said the boy. While he was waiting the fe- 
line creature with one spring took the canary. 
The way that many lose the opportunity of a 
lifetime is by the same principle. They say, 
1 1 Wait a minute. 1 ' My advice is not to wait 
at all. 

Bad habits are a fruitful source of indolence. 
Sinful indulgences shut a man's shop and dull 
his tools and steal his profits. Dissoluteness 
is generally the end of industry. There are 
those who have the rare faculty of devoting 
occasionally a day or a week to loose indul- 
gences, and at the expiration of that time go 
back with bleared eyes and tremulous hands and 
bloated cheeks to the faithful and successful 
performance of their duties. Indeed their em- 
ployers and neighbors expect this amusement 
or occasional season of frolic and wassail. 

Some of the best workmen and most skil- 
ful artisans have this mode of conducting 



68 "Ready! Ay, Ready! 



themselves, but as the time rolls on the sea- 
son of dissipation becomes more protracted 
and the season of steadiness and sobriety more 
limited, until the employers become disgusted 
and the man is given up to a continual and 
ruinous idleness. When that point has arrived 
he rushes to destruction with astonishing ve- 
locity. When a man with wrong proclivities 
of appetite has nothing to do, no former self- 
respect or moral restraint or the beseechings 
of kindred can save him. The only safety for 
a man who feels himself under the fascination 
of any form of temptation is an employment 
which affords neither recreation nor holiday. 

Nothing can be more unfortunate for a man 
of evil inclination than an occupation which 
keeps him exceedingly busy during a part of 
the year and then leaves him for weeks and 
months entirely unemployed. There are many 
men who cannot endure protracted leisure. 
They are like fractious steeds that must con- 
stantly be kept to the load, for a week's quiet 



"Ready! Ay, Ready!" 69 



makes them intractable and uncontrollable. 
Bad habits produce idleness and idleness pro- 
duces bad habits. The probability is that 
you will either have to give up your loose in- 
dulgences or else give up your occupation. 
Sin will take all enthusiasm out of your work 
and make you sick of life's drudgery, and 
though now and then between your seasons 
of dissipation you may rouse up to a sudden 
activity and start again in the chase of some 
high and noble end, even though you catch 
the game you will sink back into slothfulness 
before you have roasted that which you took 
in hunting. Bad habits unfit a man for 
everything but politics. 

Now, what are the results of indolence ? A 
marked consequence of this vice is physical 
disease. The healthiness of the whole nat- 
ural world depends upon activity. The winds, 
tossed and driven in endless circuits, scatter- 
ing the mists from the mountains, and scoop- 
ing out death damps from the caves, and 



70 "Ready! Ay, Ready!" 



blasting the miasma of swamps, and hurling 
back the fetid atmosphere of great cities, are 
healthy just because of their swiftness and 
uncontrollableness of sweep. But after a while, 
the wind falls and the hot sun pours through 
it, and when the leaves are still and the grain 
fields bend not once all day long, then pesti- 
lence smites its victims and digs trenches for 
the dead. 

The fountain, born far up in the wild wood 
of the mountain, comes down brighter for 
every obstacle against which it is riven, and 
singing a new song on every shelf of rock 
over which it bounds, till it rolls over the 
water wheels in the valley, not ashamed to 
grind corn, and runs through the long grass 
of the meadow, where the willows reach 
down to dip their branches, and the unyoked 
oxen come at eventide to cool. Healthy water! 
Bright water ! Happy water ! While some 
stream, too lazy any more to run, gathers it- 
self into a wayside pool, where the swine wal- 



"Ready! Ay, Ready!" 71 



low, and filthy insects hop over the surface, 
and reptiles crawl among the ooze, and frogs 
utter their hideous croak, and by day and 
night there rise from the foul mire and green 
scum fever and ague and death. There is an 
endless activity under foot and over head. 

Not one four o'clock in the flower bed, not 
one fly on the window pane, not one squirrel 
gathering food from the cones of the white 
pine, not one rabbit feeding on the clover 
tops, not one drop falling in a shower, not one 
minnow glancing in the sea, not one quail 
whistling from the grass, not one hawk caw- 
ing in the sky but is busy now and is busy al- 
ways, fulfilling its mission as certainly as any 
monarch on earth or any angel in heaven. 
You hear the shout of the plowboys busy in 
the field and the rattle of the whiffletrees on 
the harrow, but you do not know that there is 
more industry in the earth upturned and in 
the dumb vegetation underfoot than in all 
that you see. 



72 "Ready! Ay, Ready/" 



If you put your ear to a lump of riven sod 
you may hear nothing in the roots and spicu- 
le of grass, but there are at work spades and 
cleavers and piledrivers and battering rams 
and internecine wars. I do not wonder that 
the lively fancy of the ancients saw in the in- 
animate creation around Floras and Pomonas 
and Graces and Fauns and Fairies and Satyrs 
and Nymphs. Everything is busy. Nothing 
is inanimate, except the man who cannot see 
the life and cannot hear the music. At the 
creation the morning stars sang together, but 
they were only the choir which was to lead 
all the stars and all the mountains and all 
the seas in God's worship. All natural ob- 
jects seem at one and the same time uniting 
in work and joy and worship. In God's crea- 
tion there is no pause in either the worship, 
or the work, or the joy. Amid all natural 
objects at one and the same time it is Hal- 
loween and Whitsunday and Ash Wednesday 
and All Saints' Day. 



' ' Ready ! Ay, Ready f" 73 



All the healthy beauty of that which we 
see and hear in the natural world is depen- 
dent upon activity and unrest. Men will be 
healthy — intellectually, morally, and physi- 
cally — only upon the condition of an active 
industry. I know men die every day of over- 
work. They drop down in coalpits, and 
among the spindles of northern factories, and 
on the cotton plantations, of the south. In 
every city and town and village you find men 
groaning under burdens as, in the East, the 
camels stagger under their loads between 
Aleppo and Damascus. L,ife is crushed out 
every day at counters and workbenches and 
anvils. But there are other multitudes who 
die from mere inertia. Indulgences every 
day are contracting diseases beyond the catho- 
licon of allopathy and homeopathy and hy- 
dropathy and eclecticism. Rather than work 
they rush upon lancets and scalpels. 

Nature has provided for those who violate 
her laws by inactivity — what rheum for the 



74 "Ready! Ay, Ready!" 



eyes, and what gout for the feet, and what 
curvature for the spine, and what strictures 
for the chest, and what tubercles for the 
lungs, and what rheumatisms for the muscles, 
and what neuralgias for the nerves! Nature 
in time arraigns every such culprit at her bar, 
and presents against him an indictment of one 
hundred counts, and convicts him on each one 
of them. The laws of nature will not stop 
their action because men may be ignorant of 
them. Disease, when it comes to do its 
work, does not ask whether you understand 
hygiene or pathology or materia medica. 

If there were not so many lies written on 
tombstones and in obituaries you would see what 
multitudes of the world's inhabitants are slain 
in their attempts to escape the necessity of 
toil. Men cross oceans and continents, and 
climb the Alps, and sit under the sky of Italy 
or the shadow of the Egyptian Pyramid, and 
go down into ancient ruins, and bathe at 
Baden Baden, and come home with the same 



' ' Ready ! Ay, Ready /" 75 



shortness of breath, and the same poor diges- 
tion, and the same twitching of the nerves, 
when at home with their own spade they 
might have dug health out of the ground, or 
with their own axe hewn health out of a log, 
or with their own scvthe garnered health 
from the grain field. 

There are many who estimate the respecta- 
bility of an occupation by the little exertion 
it demands, and would not have their children 
enter any employment where their hands may 
be soiled, forgetting that a laborer's overalls 
are just as honorable as a priest's robes and an 
anvil is just as respectable as a pulpit. 
Health flies from the bed of down, and says, 
1 1 1 cannot sleep here ; y ' and from the table 
spread with ptarmigan and epicurean viands, 
saying, 4 4 1 cannot eat here ; ' 1 and from the 
vehicle of soft cushions and easy springs, 
saying, 4 c I cannot ride here ; 1 1 and from 
houses luxuriously warmed and upholstered, 
saying, u I cannot live here ; n and some day 



76 



''Ready! Ay, Ready!" 



you meet health, who declined all these *ux- 
uriant places, walking in the plow's furrow^ 
or sweltering beside the hissing forge, or spin- 
ning among the looms, or driving a dray, or 
tinning a roof, or carrying hods of brick up 
the ladder on a wall 

Indolence endangers the soul. Satan makes 
his chief conquests over men who either have 
nothing to do, or, if they have, refuse to do 
it. There is a legend that St Thomas, years 
after Christ's resurrection, began again to 
doubt, and he went to the Apostles and told 
them about his doubts. Each Apostle looked 
at him with surprise and then said he must be 
excused, for he had no time to listen any 
longer. Then St. Thomas went to the de- 
vout women of his time and expressed his 
doubts. They said they were sorry, but they 
had no time to listen. Then St. Thomas 
concluded that it was because they were so 
busy that the Apostles and the devout women 
had no doubts. 



"Ready! Ay, Ready!" 77 



Idleness not only leads a man into associa- 
tions which harm his morals, but often thrusts 
upon him the worst kind of skepticism. 
Loafers are almost always infidels, or fast get- 
ting to be. Consummate idlers never read 
the Bible, and if they appear in church can be 
distinguished in an audience of a thousand by 
their listlessness, for they are too lazy to hear. 
It is not so much among occupied merchants, 
industrious mechanics and professional men 
always busy that you hear the religion of 
Jesus maligned, as in public lounging places, 
given up to profanity and dissoluteness. They 
have no sympathy with the Book that says, 
1 4 Let him that stole steal no more : but rather 
let him labor, working with his hands the 
thing which is good, that he may have to give 
to him that needeth. 1 ' 

I never knew a man given up to thorough 
idleness that was converted. Simon and An- 
drew were converted while fishing, and Lydia 
while selling purple, and the shepherds of 



78 



"Ready! Ay, Ready!" 



Bethlehem watching their flocks heard the 
voice of angels, and Gideon was thrashing on 
the thrashing floor, but no one was ever con- 
verted with his hands in his pockets. Let 
me tell the idler that there is no hope for him 
either in this world or in the world which is 
to come. If the Son of God, who owned the 
whole universe, worked in the carpenter shop 
of Joseph, surely we who own so little yet want 
so much, ought to be busy. The redeemed 
in heaven are never idle. What exciting 
songs they sing ! 

On what messages of love they fly through 
all the universe, fulfilling God's high behests 
and taking worlds in one circuit ; rushing 
with infinite fierceness against sin and cruelty 
and oppression, and making the gates of hell 
to quake at the overthrow of the principali- 
ties of darkness, and in the same twinkle of 
an eye speeding back to their thrones with 
the news of sinners repentant. The River of 
Life is ever flowing, and the palms ever wav- 



"Ready ! Ay, Ready!" 79 



ing, and the hallelujahs ever rising, and the 
harps ever sounding, and the temple always 
open, and the golden streets always a-rush 
with chariots of salvation, and the last place 
which you ought ever to want to go to is 
heaven, unless you want to be busy. 

Alas that in this world there should be so 
many loungers and so few workers. We go 
into the vineyard of the Church and we hear 
the arbor groan under the heft of the vines 
and the clusters hanging down, large and 
thick and ripe, cluster against cluster, fairer 
than the bunches of Eshcol and Engedi, and at 
a touch they will turn into wine more ruddy 
than that of Libanus and Helbon. But 
where are the men to gather the vintage and 
tread the wine press ? There comes to your 
ear a sound of a thousand wheat fields ready 
for the sickle. The grain is ready. It is 
tall, it is full, it is golden. It waves in the 
sunlight. It rustles in the wind. It would 
fill the barns. It would crowd the garners. 



80 "Ready! Ay, Ready!" 



After a while it will lodge, or the mildew and 
the rust will smite it. 

O, where are the reapers to bind the 
sheaves ! The enemies of God are marshalled. 
You see the glitter of their bucklers. You 
hear the pawing of their chargers, and all 
along the line of battle is heard the shout of 
their great captain, and at the armies of the 
living God they hurl their defiance. Their 
multitude is like the leaves of the forest, and 
the sound of their voices like the thunder of 
the sea. Mailed in hell's impenetrable armor, 
they advance with the waving of their ban- 
ners and the dancing of their plumes. Their 
ranks are not easy to be broken, for the 
batteries of hell will open to help them and 
ten thousand angels of darkness mingle in 
the fight. Where are the chosen few who 
will throw themselves into the jaws of this 
conflict ? 

King James gave to Sir John Scott, for his 
courage, a charter of arms with a number of 



"Ready! Ay, Ready/" 81 



spears for the crest and the motto, * 4 Ready ! 
ay, ready ! "and yet, when God calls us to the 
work and the cause demands our espousal and 
interests dreadful as the judgment and solemn 
as eternity tremble in the balance, how few 
of us are willing to throw ourselves into the 
breach, crying, " Ready ! ay, ready ! n 
6 



Chrkst the Creed. 



/ TTHE reason Christianity has not made more 
* rapid advance is because the people are 
asked to believe too many things. There are, 
I believe, to-day millions of good Christians 
who have never joined the Church and are not 
counted among the I^ord's friends, because 
they cannot believe all the things that they 
are required to believe. One-half the things 
a man is expected to believe in order to enter 
the Church and reach heaven have no more to 
do with his salvation than the question, How 
many volcanoes are there in the moon ? or, 
How far apart from each other are the rings 
of Saturn? or, How many teeth there were 
in the jaw-bone with which Samson smote 
the Philistines ? I believe ten thousand things, 
but none of them have anything to do with 
my salvation, except these two, I am a sinner 

(82) 



Christ the Creed. 



83 



and Christ came to save me. Musicians tell 
us that the octave consists only of five tones 
and two semi-tones, and all the Handels and 
Haydns and Mozarts and Wagners and Schu- 
manns of all ages must do their work within 
the range of those five tones and two semi- 
tones. So I have to tell you that all the 
theology that will be of practical use in our 
world is made out of the two facts of human 
sinfulness and Divine atonement. Within 
that octave swing 4 1 The Song of Moses a&d 
the I*amb," the Christmas chant above Beth- 
lehem, and the Alleluia of all the choirs 
standing on seas of glass. 

Is there not some mode of getting out of 
the way these non-essentials, these superflui- 
ties, these divergencies, from the main issue ? 
Is there not some way of bringing the Church 
down out of the mountain of controversy and 
conventionalism and to put it on the plain 
where Christ stands ? The present attitude of 
things is like this: In a famine-struck dis- 



84 



Christ the Creed. 



trict, a table has been provided and it is loaded 
with food enough for all. The odors of the 
meats fill the air. Everything is ready. The 
platters are full. The chalices are full. The 
baskets of fruit are full. Why not let the 
people in ? The door is open. Yes, but there 
is a cluster of wise men blocking up the door, 
discussing the contents of the caster standing 
mid-table. They are shaking their fists at 
each other. One says there is too much 
vinegar in that caster, and one says there is 
too much sweet oil, and another says there is 
not the proper proportion of red pepper. I 
say, 4 4 Get out of the way and let the hungry 
people come in. ' ' Now, our blessed Iyord has 
provided a great supper, and the oxen and the 
fatlings have been killed, and fruits from all 
the vineyards and orchards of heaven crown 
the table. The world has been invited to 
come, and they look in, and they are hungry, 
and people would pour in by the millions to 
this world-wide table; but the door is blocked 



Christ the Creed, 



85 



up by controversies, and men with whole 
libraries on their backs are disputing as to 
what proportion of sweet oil and cayenne pep- 
per should make up the creed. I cry , u Get 
out of the way and let the hungry world come 
in." 

The point at which we all come short is not 
presenting Christ on the level with all the 
world's woes and wants and necessities. 
Astronomers have been busy measuring worlds, 
and they have told us how great is the circum- 
ference of this world and how great is its 
diameter, yea, they have kept on until they 
have weighed our planet and found its weight 
to be six sextillion tons. But by no science 
has the weight of this world's trouble been 
weighed. Now, Christ standing on the level 
of our humanity stands in sympathy with 
every trouble. There are so many aching 
heads: His ached under the thorns. There 
are so many weary feet : His were worn with 
the long journey up and down the land that 



86 



Christ the Creed. 



received him not. There are so many perse- 
cuted souls: every hour of His life was under 
human outrage. The world had no better 
place to receive Him than a cattle pen, and its 
farewell was a slap on His cheek and a spear 
in His side. So intensely human was He that 
there has not been in all our race a grief or 
infirmity or exhaustion or pang that did not 
touch Him once and that does not touch Him 
now. The lepers, the paralytics, the imbecile, 
the maniac, the courtesan, the repentant 
brigand — which one did He turn off, which 
one did He not pity, which one did He not 
help? 

The universal trouble of the world is 
bereavement. One may escape all the other 
troubles, but that no soul escapes. Out of 
that bitter cup every one must take a drink. 
For instance, in order that all might know 
how He sympathizes with those who have lost 
a daughter, Christ comes to the house of 
Jairus. There is such a big crowd around the 



Christ the Creed. 



87 



door, He and His disciples have to push their 
way in. From the throng of people, I con- 
clude that this girl must have been very popu- 
lar; she was one of those children whom every- 
body likes. After Christ got into the house, 
there was such a loud weeping that the ordi- 
nary tones of voice could not be heard. I do 
not wonder. The dead daughter was twelve 
years of age. It is about the happiest time 
in most lives. Very little children suffer many 
injustices because they are children, and child- 
hood is not a desirable part of human exist- 
ence — they get whacked or sat on. But, at 
twelve years of age, the child has come to 
self-assertion and is apt to make her rights 
known. And, then, twelve years of age is too 
early for the cares and anxieties of life. So 
this girl was, I think, the merriment of the 
household. She furnished for them the 
mimicry, and the harmless mischief, and 
roused the guffaw that often rang through that 
happy home. But, now she is dead, and the 



88 



Christ the Creed. 



grief at her departure is as violent as her pres- 
ence had been vivacious and inspiriting. Oh, 
the bereavement was so sharp, so overwhelm- 
ing! How could they give her up! I suspect 
that they blamed themselves for this or for 
that. Oh, if they had had some other doctor, 
or taken some other medicine, or had been 
more careful of her health, or if they had not 
given her that reproof sometime when she had 
not really deserved it ! Oh, if they had been 
more patient with her hilarities and, instead 
of hushing her play, had participated in it ! 
You know there are so many things that parents 
always blame themselves for at such times. 
Only twelve years of age ! So fair, so promis- 
ing, so full of life a few days ago, and now so 
still ! Oh, what it is to have a daughter dead ! 
The room is full of folks, but yonder is the 
room where the young sleeper is. The crowd 
cannot go in there. Only six persons enter, 
five besides Christ — three friends, and, of 
course, the father and mother. They have the 



Christ the Creed. 



89 



first right to go in. The heaviest part of the 
grief was theirs. All eyes in that room are on 
the face of this girl. There lay the beautiful 
hand, white and finely shapen, but it was not 
lifted in greeting to any of the group. Christ 
stepped forward and took hold of that hand, 
and said, with a tone and accentuation charged 
with tenderness and command : v 1 Damsel, I 
say unto thee, arise ! M and, without a moment's 
delay, she arose, her eyes wide open, her 
cheeks turning from white lily to red rose, 
and the parents cry, 11 She lives ! She lives ! M 
and in the next room, they take up the sound, 
14 She lives ! She lives ! " and the throng in 
front of the doorway repeat it, 14 She lives! 
She lives ! M Will not all those who have lost 
a daughter feel that such a Christ as that can 
sympathize ? 

On another occasion, He showed how He felt 
about the loss of a son. Here are the obse- 
quies. A long procession ; a widowed mother 
following her only son. I know not how long 



90 



Christ the Creed, 



the husband and father had been gone, but 
upon this son, who had now come to be a 
young man, the leadership of that household 
had fallen. I think he had got to be the bread- 
winner. He was proud of his mother, and 
she should never lack anything as long as he 
lived. And there is no grander spectacle on 
earth than a young man standing between 
want and a widowed mother. But that young 
man had fallen lifeless under accident or dis- 
aster, and he was being carried out. Only a 
very few hours in that land are allowed to pass 
between decease and burial ; it is the same day 
or the next. And there they move on. Christ 
meets the procession. His eye picks out the 
chief mourner. He puts his hand on the bier, 
as much as to say to the pall-bearers, ( ' Stop ! 
There will be no burial to-day. That broken 
heart must be healed. That mother must have 
her home rebuilt. ' 1 And then looking into the 
face of the young man (for in those lands the 
face is always exposed in such a procession), 



Christ the Creed. 



Christ speaks one sentence, before which 
Death fell prostrate under the bier : 4 4 Young 
man, I say unto thee, arise. n He sat up, 
while the overjoyed mother wrapped him in 
her arms, and well-nigh smothered him with 
her caresses, and the air was rent with congra- 
tulations. Can any one who has ever lost a 
son doubt that Christ sympathizes with such 
woe? And how many there are who need 
that particular comfort. It was not hollow 
sentiment, when, after Edmund Burke, the 
greatest orator of his time, had lost his son, 
and the bereaved father, crossing the pasture 
field, met the horse that had belonged to that 
deceased son, that the orator threw his arms 
around the horse's neck and kissed the dumb 
brute. It was not hollow sentiment, when 
David, the psalmist, cried out at the news of his 
son's death, although he had been a desperately 
bad boy : " O, Absalom, my son ! my son ! 
Would God I had died for thee. O, Absa- 
lom, my son ! my son ! M But for such and 



92 



Christ the Creed. 



all other bereavement there is Divine condo- 
lence. 

I care not from what side you approach 
Christ, you can touch Him and get His help. 
Is it mental depression you suffer ? Remember 
Him who said : 4 1 My God, my God, why hast 
Thou forsaken Me? n Is it a struggle for 
bread? Remember Him who fed the five 
thousand with two minnows and five biscuits, 
neither of the biscuits larger than your fist. 
Is it chronic ailment ? Remember the woman 
who for eighteen years was bent almost double, 
and He lifted her face until she could look into 
the blue sky. Are you a sailor and spend 
your life battling with the tempests ? Re- 
member Him who flung the tempest of 
Genesareth flat on the crystal pavement of 
a quiet sea. 

Christ is in sympathy with all who have 
trouble with their eyes, and that is be- 
coming an almost universal trouble through 
much reading in rail cars, and the over-pres- 



Christ the Creed. 



93 



sure of stud}' in the schools, where children 
are expected to be philosophers at ten ; boys 
and girls at fourteen with spectacles. I say 
with all such trouble Christ is in sympathy. 
Witness blind Bartimeus. W itness the two blind 
men in the house. Witness the two blind men 
near Jericho. Witness the man born blind. 
Did He not turn their perpetual midnight into 
midnoon, till they ran up and down clapping 
their hands and saying, 1 ' I see ! I see ! 1 1 
That Christ is in sympathy with those who 
stammer, or have silenced ears, notice how 
promptly He came to that man with impedi- 
ment of speech and gave him command of the 
tongue so that he could speak with ease, and, 
putting His fingers into the ears, retimed the 
tympanum. Is there a lack of circulation in 
your arm, think of Him who cured the defec- 
tive circulation and the inactive muscles of a 
patient who had lost the use of hand and arm, 
by saying, 1 1 Stretch forth thy hand ! 1 1 and 
the veins and nerves and muscles resumed 



94 



Christ the Creed, 



their offices, and though in doing so the joints 
may have cracked from long disuse, and there 
may have been a strange sensation from elbow 
to finger-tip, he stretched it forth ! And 
nothing is the matter with you, but you may 
appeal to a sympathetic Christ. And if you 
feel yourself to be a great sinner, hear what 
He said to that repenting Magdalen, while 
with a scalding sarcasm He dashed her hypo- 
critical pursuers. 

And see how He made an immortal liturgy 
out of the /publican's cry, u God be merciful 
to me a sinner, " a prayer so short that the 
most overwhelmed offender can utter it, and 
yet long enough to win celestial dominions. 
It was well put by a man who had been con- 
verted, and who remembered that in his disso- 
lute days he found it hard to get occupation, 
because he could not present a certificate for 
good character. In commending Christ to the 
people he said, ' 4 Bless God, I have found out 
that Jesus will take a man without a charac- 



Christ the Creed. 



95 



ter ! ' 1 Christ on a level with suffering hu- 
manity. No climbing up through attributes 
you cannot understand. No ascending of the 
heights of beautiful rhetoric of prayer. No 
straining after elevations you cannot reach. 
No hunting for a God that you cannot find. 
But going right straight to Him and looking 
into His face and taking His hand and asking 
for His pardon, His comfort, His grace, His 
heaven. 

When during the siege of Sebastopol an 
officer had commanded a private soldier to 
stand on the wall exposed to the enemy, and 
receive the ammunition as it was handed up, 
while he, the officer, stood in a place sheltered 
from the enemy's guns, General Gordon leaped 
upon the wall to help, and commanded the 
officer to follow him, and then closed with the 
words, u Never order a man to do anything 
that you are afraid to do yourself. 1 1 Glory be 
to God, the Captain of our salvation has Him- 
self gone through all the exposures in which 



96 



Christ the Creed, 



He commands us to be courageous. He has 
been through it all, and now offers His sym- 
pathy in similar struggle. One of the kings 
of England one night in disguise walking the 
streets of London, and not giving account of 
himself, was arrested and put in a miserable 
prison. When released and getting back to 
the palace, he ordered thirty tons of coal and 
a large supply of food for the night prisoners 
of London. Out of his own experiences that 
night he did this. And our Lord, the King 
aforetime, endungeoned, and sick, and hungry, 
and persecuted, and slain, out of His own ex- 
periences is ready to help all, and pardon all, 
and comfort all, and rescue all. 

A Christ easy to get at ! No armed sentinel 
to challenge you. No ruthless officer to scru- 
tinize the papers you present. Immediate 
response. Immediate forgiveness. Immediate 
solace. Through what struggle people must 
go to get a pardon from worldly authority ! 
By what petition, by what hindrance, by what 



Christ the Creed. 



97 



nervous strain of anxiety, by what adroitness. 
A count of Italy was condemned to be put to 
death at Milan. The countess, hearing of the 
sentence, hastened to Vienna to seek his par- 
don. The death warrant was already on its 
way. The countess, arriving in Vienna in the 
night, hastened to the palace gates. The 
attendants forbade her entrance at all, and 
especially at night, but she overcame them 
with her entreaties, and the Empress was 
wakened and the countess pleaded before her 
for the life of her husband, and then the Em- 
peror was wakened to hear the same plea. 
Commutation of sentence was granted, but 
how could she overtake the officer who had 
started with the death-warrant, and would she 
be too late to save the life of her husband ? 
By four relays of horses, and stopping not a 
moment for food she reached the city of Milan 
as her husband was on the way to the scaffold. 
Just in time to save him, and not a minute to 
spare, she came up. You see there were two 
7 



98 



Christ the Creed. 



difficulties in the way. The one was to get 
the pardon signed, and the other to bring it 
to the right place in time. Glory be to God, 
we need go through no such exigency. No 
long road to travel. No pitiless beating at a 
palace gate. Pardon here. Pardon now. 
Pardon for the asking. Pardon forever. 



EVERY-DAY REL1QI0N. 



TN all ages of the world there has been a 
* tendency to set apart certain days, places, 
and occasions for worship, and to think those 
were the chief realms in which religion was 
to act. Now, holy days and holy places have 
their importance. They give opportunity for 
especial performance of Christian duty, and 
for regaling of the religious appetite ; but 
they cannot take the place of continuous ex- 
ercise of faith and prayer. In other words, a 
man cannot be so much of a Christian on 
Sunday that he can afford to be a worldling 
all the rest of the week. If a steamer put 
out for Southampton, and go one day in that 
direction and the other six days in other di- 
rections, how long before the steamer will get 
to Southampton? It will never get there. 

(99) 



100 Every-day Religion. 



And though a man may seem to be voyaging 
heavenward during the holy Sabbath-day, if, 
during the following six days of the week, he is 
going toward the world, and toward the flesh, 
and toward the devil, he will never ride up 
into the peaceful harbor of heaven. You can- 
not eat so much at the Sabbath banquet that 
you can afford religious abstinence the other 
six days. Heroism and princely behavior on 
great occasions are no apology for lack of 
right demeanor in circumstances insignificant 
and inconspicuous. The genuine Christian 
life is not spasmodic, does not go by fits and 
starts. It toils on through heat and cold, up 
steep mountains and along dangerous declivi- 
ties, its eye on the everlasting hills crowned 
with the castles of the blessed. 

We want to bring the religion of Christ into 
our conversation. When a dam breaks and 
two or three villages are overwhelmed, or an 
earthquake in South America swallows a 
whole city, then people begin to talk about 



Every -day Religion. 



101 



the uncertainty of life, and they imagine that 
they are engaged in positively religious con- 
versation. No. You may talk about these 
things, and have no grace of God at all in 
your heart. We ought every day to be talk- 
ing religion. If there is anything glad about 
it, anything beautiful about it, anything im- 
portant about it, we ought to be continuously 
discussing it. I have noticed that men, just 
in proportion as their Christian experience is 
shallow, talk about funerals, and grave-yards, 
and tombstones, and death-beds. The real 
genuine Christian man talks chiefly about this 
life and the great eternity beyond, and not so 
much about the insignificant pass between 
these two residences. And yet how few circles 
there are where the religion of Jesus Christ is 
welcome. Go into a circle, even of Christian 
people, where they are full of joy and hilarity, 
and talk about Christ or heaven, and every- 
thing is immediately silenced. As on a sum- 
mer day, when the forests are full of life, chat- 



102 



Every -day Religion, 



ter, and chirrup, and carol — a mighty chorus 
of bird-harmony, every tree-branch an orches- 
tra — if a hawk appear in the sky, every voice 
stops, and the forests are still ; just so I have 
seen a lively religious circle silenced on the 
appearance of anything like religious conver- 
sation. No one has anything to say, save, 
perhaps, some old patriarch in the corner of 
the room, who really thinks that something 
ought to be said, under the circumstances ; so 
he puts one foot over the other, and heaves a 
long sigh, and says, u Oh, yes; that's so, 
that's so! " 

My friends, the religion of Jesus Christ is 
something to talk about with a glad heart. It 
is brighter than the waters, it is more cheer- 
ful than sunshine. Do not go around groan- 
ing about your religion, when you ought to 
be singing it or talking it in cheerful tones of 
voice. How often it is that we find men 
whose lives are utterly inconsistent attempt to 
talk religion, and always make a failure of it! 



Every -day Religion. 



103 



My friends, we must live religion, or we can- 
not talk it. If a man is cranky, and cross, 
and uncongenial, and hard in his dealings, 
and then ^begins to talk about Christ and 
heaven, everybody is repelled by it. Yet I 
have heard such men say, in whining tones, 
4 4 We are miserable sinners ; " u The Lord 
bless you ; n u The Lord have mercy on you; n 
their conversation interlarded with such ex- 
pressions, which mean nothing but canting ; 
and canting is the worst form of hypocrisy. 
If we have really felt the religion of Christ in 
our hearts, let us talk it, and talk it with an 
illuminated countenance, remembering that 
when two Christian people talk, God gives 
especial attention, and writes down what they 
say. ' 4 Then they that feared the Lord spake 
often one of another : and the Lord hearkened, 
and heard it, — and a book of remembrance 
was written. ' ' 

We must bring the religion of Christ into 
our employments. " Oh, n you say, 44 that is 



104 



Every -day Religion. 



very well if a man handle large sums of money, 
or if he have an extensive traffic ; but in my 
thread-and-needle store, in my trimming es- 
tablishment, in the humble work in life that 
I am called to, the sphere is too small for the 
action of such grand heavenly principles. " 
Who told you so ? Do you not know that God 
watches the faded leaf on the brook's surface 
as certainly as he does the path of a blazing 
sun ? And the moss that creeps up the side 
of the rock makes as much impression upon 
God's mind as the waving tops of Oregon pine 
and Lebanon cedar ; and the alder, crackling 
under the cow's hoof, sounds as loud in God's 
ear as the snap of a world's conflagration. 
When you have anything to do in life, how- 
ever humble it may seem to be, God is always 
there to help you to do it. If your work is 
that of a fisherman, then God will help you, 
as he helped Simon when he dragged Gen- 
nesaret. If your work is drawing water, then 
he will help you, as when he talked at the 



Every-day Religion. 105 



well-curb to the Samaritan woman. If you 
are engaged in the custom-house, he will lead 
you, as he led Matthew sitting at the receipt 
of custom. A religion that is not good in 
one place is not worth anything in another 
place. The man who has only a day's wages 
in his pocket as certainly needs the guidance 
of religion, as he who rattles the keys of a 
bank, and could abscond with a hundred 
thousand hard dollars. 

There are those prominent in the churches 
who seem to be, on public occasions, very de- 
vout, who do not put the principles of Christ's 
religion into practice. They are the most in- 
exorable of creditors. They are the most 
grasping of dealers. They are known as 
sharpers on the street. They fleece every 
sheep they can catch. A country merchant 
comes in to buy spring or fall goods, and he 
gets into the store of one of these professed 
Christian men who have really no grace in 
their hearts, and he is completely swindled. 



106 



Every-day Religion. 



He is so overcome that he cannot get out of 
town during the week. He stays in town over 
Sunday, goes into some church to get Chris- 
tian consolation, when, what is his amazement 
to find that the very man who hands him the 
poor-box in the church is the one who re- 
lieved him of his money ! But never mind ; 
the deacon has his black coat on now. He 
looks solemn, and goes home talking about 
4 4 the blessed sermon. ' ' If the wheat in the 
churches should be put into a hopper, the first 
turn of the crank would make the chaff fly, 
I tell you. Some of these men are great 
sticklers for Gospel preaching. They say, 
" You stand there in bands and surplice and 
gown, and preach — preach like an angel, and 
we will stand out here and attend to business. 
Don't mix things. Don't get business and 
religion in the same bucket. You attend to 
your matters, and we will attend to ours." 
They do not know that God sees every cheat 
they have practiced in the last six years; that 



Every -day Religion. 



107 



He can look through the iron wall of their 
fireproof safe; that He has counted every dis- 
honest dollar they have in their pocket, and 
that a day of judgment will come. These in- 
consistent Christian men will sit on the Sab- 
bath night in the house of God, singing, at 
the close of the sendee, 1 1 Rock of Ages cleft 
for me," and then, when the benediction is 
prononnced, shut the pew-door, and say, as 
they go out, u Good-bye, Religion. I'll be 
back next Sunday. ' 1 

I think that the Church of God and the 
Sabbath are only an armory where we are to 
get weapons. When war comes, if a man 
wants to fight for his country he does not go 
to Troy or Springfield to do battling, but he 
goes there for swords and muskets. I look 
upon the Church of Christ and the Sabbath 
day as only the place and time where and 
when we are to get armed for Christian con- 
flict ; but the battlefield is on Monday, Tues- 
day, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sat- 



108 



Every-day Religion. 



urday . { 4 St. Martin' s, ' ' and c ( Lenox, ' ' and 
u Old Hundred " do not amount to anything 
unless they sing all the week. A sermon is 
useless unless we can take it with us behind 
the plow and the counter. The Sabbath 
day is worthless if it last only twenty-four 
hours. 

There are many Christians who say : 1 1 We 
are willing to serve God, but we do not want 
to do it in these spheres about which we are 
talking; and it seems so insipid and monot- 
onous. If we had some great occasion, if we 
had lived in the time of Luther, if we had 
been Paul's travelling companion, if we could 
serve God on a great scale, we would do it ; 
but we can't in this everyday life." I admit 
that a great deal of the romance and knight- 
errantry of life have disappeared before the 
advance of this practical age. The ancient 
temples of Rouen have been changed into 
storehouses and smithies. The residences of 
poets and princes have been turned into brok- 



Every -day Religion. 109 

ers' shops. The classic mansion of Ashland 
has been cut up into walking-sticks. The 
groves where the poets said the gods dwelt 
have been carted out for fire- wood. The muses 
that we used to read about have disappeared 
before the emigrant's axe and the trapper's 
gun, and that man who is waiting for a life 
bewitched of wonders will never find it. There 
is, however, a field for endurance and great 
achievement, but it is in everyday life. There 
are Alps to scale, there are Hellesponts to 
swim, there are fires to brave; but they are all 
around us now. This is the hardest kind of 
martyrdom to bear. It took grace to lead 
Latimer and Ridley through the fire triumph- 
antly when their armed enemies and their 
friends were looking on; but it requires more 
grace now to bring men through persecution, 
when nobody is looking on. I could show you 
in this city a woman who has had rheumatism 
for twenty years, who has endured more 
suffering and exhausted more grace than would 



110 Every -day Religion. 

have made twenty martyrs pass triumphantly 
through the fire. If you are not faithful in 
an insignificant position in life, you would not 
be faithful in a grand mission. If you cannot 
stand the bite of a midge, how could you en- 
dure the breath of a basilisk ? 

Do not think that any work God gives you 
to do in the world is on too small a scale for 
you to do. The whole universe is not ashamed 
to take care of one little flower. Plato had a 
fable which I have now nearly forgotten, but 
it ran something like this: He said spirits of 
the other world came back to this world to 
find a body and find a sphere of work. One 
spirit came and took the body of a king, and 
did his work. Another spirit came and took 
the body of a poet, and did his work. After 
a while Ulysses came, and he said, " Why, all 
the fine bodies are taken, and all the grand 
work is taken. There is nothing left for me. ' ' 
And some one replied, 1 1 Ah ! the best one has 
been left for you. n Ulysses said, " What's 



Every -day Religion. 



Ill 



that?" And the reply was, "The body of a 
common man, doing a common work, and for 
a common reward. " A good fable for the 
world, and just as good a fable for the Chtirch. 
Whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we 
do, let us do it to the glory of God. 

We need to bring the religion of Christ into 
our commonest trials. For severe losses, for 
bereavement, for trouble that shocks like an 
earthquake and that blasts like a storm, we 
prescribe religious consolation; but, business 
man, for the small annoyances of last week, 
how much of the grace of God did you apply ? 
"Oh!" you say, "these trials are too small 
for such application. ' ' My brother, they are 
shaping your character, they are souring your 
temper, they are wearing out your patience, 
and they are making you less and less of a 
man. I go into a sculptor's studio, and see 
him shaping a statue. He has a chisel in one 
hand and a mallet in the other, and he gives 
a very gentle stroke — click, click, click! I 



112 



Every-day Religion. 



say, * 4 Why don' t you strike harder ?" " Oh !' * 
he replies, 1 1 that would shatter the statue. I 
can't do it that way; I must do it this way." 
So he works on, and after a while the features 
come out, and everybody that enters the 
studio is charmed and fascinated. Well, God 
has your soul under process of development, 
and it is the little annoyances and vexations 
of life that are chiseling out your immortal 
nature. It is click, click, click ! I wonder 
why some great providence does not come, 
and with one stroke prepare you for heaven. 
Ah, no. God says that is not the way. And 
so he keeps on by strokes of little annoyances, 
little sorrows, little vexations, until at last 
you shall be a glad spectacle for angels and 
for men. You know that a large fortune may 
be spent in small change, and a vast amount 
of moral character may go away in small de- 
pletion. It is the little troubles of life that 
are having more effect upon you than great 
ones. A swarm of locusts will kill a grain- 



Every -day Religion, 



113 



field sooner than the incursion of three or four 
cattle. You say, " Since I lost my child, 
since I lost my property, I have been a differ- 
ent man. ' ) But you do not recognize the ar- 
chitecture of little annoyances that are hewing, 
digging, cutting, shaping, splitting, and in- 
terjoining your moral qualities. Rats may 
sink a ship. One lucifer match may send de- 
struction through a block of storehouses. 
Catherine de Medicis got her death from 
smelling a poisonous rose. Columbus by stop- 
ping and asking for a piece of bread and a 
drink of water at a Franciscan convent, was 
led to the discovery of the new world. And 
there is an intimate connection between trifles 
and immensities, between nothings and every - 
things. 

Now, be careful to let none of those annoy- 
ances go through your soul unarraigned. Com- 
pel them to administer to your spiritual wealth. 
The scratch of a sixpenny nail sometimes 
produces locked-jaw, and the clip of a most 
8 



114 



Every-day Religion. 



infinitesimal annoyance may damage you for 
ever. Do not let any annoyance or perplexity 
come across your soul without its making you 
better. 

Our National Government did not think it 
belittling to put a tax on pins, and a tax on 
buckles, and a tax on shoes. The individual 
taxes do not amount to much, but in the ag- 
gregate to millions and millions of dollars. 
And I would have you, O Christian man, put 
a high tariff on every annoyance and vexation 
that comes through your soul. This might 
not amount to much, in single cases, but in 
the aggregate it would be a great revenue of 
spiritual strength and satisfaction. A bee can 
suck honey even out of a nettle ; and if you 
have the grace of God in your heart, you can 
get sweetness out of that which would other- 
wise irritate and annoy. The only way to 
get prepared for the great troubles of life is to 
conquer these small troubles. And I have to 
tell you, O Christian man, if you cannot 



Every -day Reltgiofi. 



115 



apply the principles of Christ's religion on a 
small scale, you will never be able to apply 
them on a large scale. If you cannot suc- 
cessfully contend against these small sorrows 
that come down single-handed, what will you 
do when the greater disasters of life come 
down with thundering artillery, rolling over 
your soul ? 

We must bring the religion of Christ into 
our commonest blessings. When the autumn 
comes, and the harvests are in, and the gov- 
ernors make proclamation, we assemble in 
churches and we are very thankful. But 
every day ought to be a thanksgiving day. 
We do not recognize the common mercies of 
life. We have to see a blind man led by his dog 
before we begin to bethink ourselves of what 
a grand thing it is to have undimmed eyesight. 
We have to see some wounded man hobbling 
on his crutch, or with his empty coat sleeve 
pinned up, before we learn to think what a 
grand thing God did for us when he gave us 



116 Every -day Religion. 



the healthy use of our limbs. We are so 
stupid that nothing but the misfortunes of 
others can rouse us up to our blessings. As 
the ox grazes in the pasture up to its eyes in 
clover yet never thinking who makes the 
clover, and as the bird picks up the worm 
from the furrow not knowing that it is God 
who makes everything, from the animalcula 
in the sod to the seraph on the throne, so we 
go on eating, drinking, and enjoying, but 
never thanking, or seldom thanking; or, if 
thanking at all, with only half a heart. 

I compared our indifference to the brute; 
but perhaps I wronged the brute. I do not 
know but that, among its other instincts, it 
may have an instinct by which it recognizes 
the Divine hand that feeds it. I do not know 
but that God is, through it, holding commu- 
nication with what we call " irrational crea- 
tion. ' ' The cow that stands under the willow 
by the water-course, chewing its cud, looks 
very thankful ; and who can tell how much 



Every -day Religion. 



Ill 



a bird means by its song ? The aroma of the 
flowers smells like incense, and the mist aris- 
ing from the river looks like the smoke of a 
morning sacrifice. Oh, that we were as re- 
sponsive ! Yet who thanks God for the water 
that gnshes up in the well, and that foams in 
the cascade, and that laughs over the rocks, 
and that patters in the showers, and that 
claps its hands in the sea ? Who thanks God 
for the air, the fountain of life, the bridge of 
sunbeams, the path of sound, the great fan on 
a hot summer's day ? Who thanks God for 
this wonderful physical organism — this sweep 
of the vision — this chime of harmony struck 
into the ear — this soft tread of a myriad de- 
lights over the nervous tissue — this rolling of 
the crimson tide through artery and vein — 
this drumming of the heart on our march to 
immortality? We take all these things as a 
matter of course. 

But suppose God should withdraw these 
common blessings ? Your body would become 



118 Every -day Religion. 



an Inquisition of torture, the cloud would re- 
fuse rain, every green thing would crumble 
up, and the earth would crack open under 
your feet. The air would cease its healthful 
circulation, pestilence would swoop, and every 
house would become a place of skulls. Streams 
would first swim with vermin, and then dry 
up ; and thirst, and hunger, and anguish, and 
despair would lift their sceptres. Oh, com- 
pare such a life as that with the life you live 
with your families. Is it not time that, with 
every word of our lips and with every action 
of our life, we began to acknowledge these 
everyday mercies? 



BUSINESS A 5CHGDL. 



^^HERE is no war between religion and 
^ business, between ledgers and Bibles, be- 
tween churches and counting-houses. On the 
contrary, religion accelerates business, shar- 
pens men's wits, sweetens acerbity of disposi- 
tion, fillips the blood of phleginatics, and 
throws more velocity into the wheels of hard 
work. It gives better balancing to the judg- 
ment, more strength to the will, more muscle 
to industry, and throws into enthusiasm a 
more consecrated fire. You cannot in all the 
round of the world show me a man whose 
honest business has been despoiled by religion. 

The industrial classes are divided into three 
groups : producers, manufacturers, traders. 
Producers, such as farmers and miners. 
Manufacturers, such as those who turn corn 
(119) 



120 



Business a School. 



into food, and wool and flax into apparel. 
Traders, such as make profit out of the trans- 
fer and exchange of all that which is pro- 
duced and manufactured. A business man 
may belong to any one or all of these classes, 
and not one is independent of any other. 
When the Prince Imperial of France fell on 
the Zulu battle-field because the strap fasten- 
ing the stirrup to the saddle broke as he clung 
to it, his comrades all escaping, but he falling 
under the lances of the savages, a great many 
people blamed the Empress for allowing her 
son to go forth into that battle-field, and 
others blamed the English Government for ac- 
cepting the sacrifice, and others blamed the 
Zulus for their barbarism. The one most to 
blame was the harness-maker who fashioned 
that strap of the stirrup out of shoddy and 
imperfect material, as it was found to have 
been afterward. If the strap had held, the 
Prince Imperial would probably have been 
alive to-day. But the strap broke. No 



Business a School. 



121 



prince independent of a harness-maker ! 
High, low, wise, ignorant, you in one occu- 
pation, I in another, all bound together. So 
that there must be one continuous line of 
sympathy with each other's work. But what- 
ever your vocation, if you have a multiplicity 
of engagements, if into your life there come 
losses and annoyances and perturbations as 
well as percentages and dividends, if you are 
pursued from Monday morning until Satur- 
day night, and from January to January by 
inexorable obligation and duty, then you are 
a business man, or you are a business woman. 

Business life was intended as a school of 
energy. God gives us a certain amount of 
raw material out of which we are to hew our 
character. Our faculties are to be reset, 
rounded, and sharpened up. Our young folks 
having graduated from school or college need 
a higher education, that which the rasping 
and collision of every-day life alone can ef. 
feet. Energy is wrought out only in a fire. 



122 



Business a School. 



After a man has been in business activity ten, 
twenty, thirty years his energy is not to be 
measured by weights or plummets or ladders. 
There is no height it cannot scale, and there 
is no depth it cannot fathom, and there is no 
obstacle it cannot thrash. 

Now, my brother, why did God put you in 
that school of energy ? Was it merely that 
you might be a yardstick to measure cloth, or 
a steelyard to weigh flour ? Was it merely 
that you might be better qualified to chaffer 
and to higgle ? No. God placed you in that 
school of energy that you might be developed 
for Christian work. If the undeveloped tal- 
ents in Christian churches of to-day were 
brought out and thoroughly harnessed, I be- 
lieve the whole world would be converted to 
God in a short time. There are so many deep 
streams that are turning no mill-wheels and 
that are harnessed to no factory bands. Now 
God demands the best lamb out of every 
flock. He demands the richest sheaf of 



Business a School. 



123 



every harvest. He demands the best men of 
every generation. A cause in which Newton 
and Locke and Mansfield toiled you and I can 
afford to toil in. 

Oh, for fewer idlers in the cause of Christ 
and for more Christian workers, men who 
shall take the same energy that from Monday 
morning to Saturday night they put forth for 
the achievement of a livelihood or the gather- 
ing of a fortune, and on Sabbath days put it 
forth to the advantage of Christ's kingdom 
and the bringing of men to the Lord. Dr. 
Duff, in South Wales, saw a man who had in- 
herited a great fortune. The man said to 
him : " I had to be very busy for many years 
of my life getting my livelihood. After a 
while this fortune came to me, and there has 
been no necessity that I toil since. There 
came a time when I said to myself, 1 Shall I 
now retire from business, or shall I go on and 
serve the Lord in my worldly occupation ? ' " 
He said: "I resolved on the latter, and I 



124 



Business a School. 



have been more industrious in commercial 
circles than I ever was before, and since that 
hour I have never kept a farthing for myself. 
I have thought it to be a great shame if I 
couldn't toil as hard for the Lord as I had 
toiled for myself, and all the products of my 
factories and my commercial establishments 
to the last farthing have gone for the building 
of Christian institutions and supporting the 
Church of God." Oh, if the same energy 
put forth for the world could be put forth for 
God ! Oh, if a thousand men in these great 
cities who have achieved a fortune could see it 
their duty to do all business for Christ and 
the alleviation of the world's suffering ! 

Business life is a school of patience. In 
your every-day life how many things to an- 
noy and to disquiet ! Bargains will rub. 
Commercial men will sometimes fail to meet 
their engagements. Cash book and money 
drawer will sometimes quarrel. Goods or- 
dered for a special emergency will come too 



Business a School. 



125 



late, or be damaged in the transportation. 
People intending no harm will go shopping 
without any intention of purchase, overturn- 
ing great stocks of goods, and insisting that 
you break the dozen. More bad debts on the 
ledger. More counterfeit bills in the drawer. 
More debts to pay for other people. More 
meannesses on the part of partners in busi- 
ness. Annoyance after annoyance, vexation 
after vexation, and loss after loss. All that 
process will either break you down or brighten 
you up. It is a school of patience. You 
have known men under the process to become 
petulant, and choleric, and angry, and pugna- 
cious, and cross, and sour, and queer, and 
they lost their customers, and their name be- 
came a detestation. Other men have been 
brightened up under the process. They were 
toughened by the exposure. They were like 
rocks, all the more valuable for being blasted. 
At first they had to choke down their wrath, 
at first they had to bite their lip, at first they 



126 



Business a School. 



thought of some stinging retort they would 
like to make ; but they conquered their impa- 
tience. They have kind words now for sar- 
castic flings. They have gentle behavior now 
for unmannerly customers. They are patient 
now with unfortunate debtors. They have 
Christian reflections now for sudden reverses. 
Where did they get that patience ? By hear- 
ing a minister preach concerning it on Sab- 
bath ? Oh, no. They got it just where you 
will get it — if you ever get it at all— selling 
hats, discounting notes, turning banisters, 
plowing corn, tinning roofs, pleading causes. 
Oh, that amid the turmoil and anxiety and 
exasperation of every-day life you might 
hear the voice of God saying, "In patience 
possess your soul. Let patience have her per- 
fect work." 

Business life is a school of useful knowl- 
edge. Merchants do not read many books 
and do not study lexicons. They do not dive 
int© profounds of learning, and yet nearly all 



Business a School. 



127 



through their occupations come to understand 
questions of finance, and politics, and geogra- 
phy, and jurisprudence, and ethics. Business 
is a severe school-mistress. If pupils will not 
learn, she strikes them over the head and the 
heart with severe losses. You put $5000 
into an enterprise. It is all gone. You say, 
"That is a dead loss." Oh, no. You are 
paying the schooling. That was only tuition, 
very large tuition — I told you it was a very 
severe school-mistress — but it was worth it 
You learned things under that process you 
would not have learned in any other way. 
Traders in grain come to know something 
about foreign harvests ; traders in fruit come 
to know something about the prospects of 
tropical production ; manufacturers of Ameri- 
can goods come to understand the tariff on 
imported articles ; publishers of books must 
come to understand the law of copyright ; 
owners of ships must come to know winds 
and shoals and navigation ; and every bale of 



128 



Business a School. 



cotton, and every raisin cask, and every tea 
box, and every cluster of bananas is so much 
literature for a business man. Now, my 
brother, what are you going to do with the in- 
telligence ? Do you suppose God put you in 
this school of information merely that you 
might be sharper in a trade, that you might 
be more successful as a wordling ? Oh, no ; it 
was that you might take that useful informa- 
tion and use it for Jesus Christ. Can it be 
that you have been dealing with foreign lands 
and never had the missionary spirit, wishing 
the salvation of foreign people ? Can it be 
that you have become acquainted with all the 
outrages inflicted in business life and that you 
have never tried to bring to bear that Gospel 
which is to extirpate all evil and correct all 
wrongs and illumine all darkness and lift up 
all wretchedness and save men for this world 
and the world to come ? Can it be that un- 
derstanding all the intricacies of business, you 
know nothing about those things which will 



Business a School. 



129 



last after all the bills of exchange and con- 
signments and invoices and rent rolls shall 
have crumpled up and been consumed in the 
fires of the L,ast Great Day ? Can it be that 
a man will be wise for time and a fool for 
eternity ? 

Business life is a school for integrity. No 
man knows what he will do when he is 
tempted. There are thousands of men who 
have kept their integrity merely because they 
never have been tested. A man was elected 
treasurer of the State of Maine some years 
ago. He was distinguished for his honesty, 
usefulness, and uprightness, but before one 
year had passed he had taken of the public 
funds for his own private use, and was hurled 
out of office in disgrace. Distinguished for 
virtue before. Distinguished for crime after. 
You can call over the names of men just like 
that, in whose honesty you had complete con- 
fidence, but placed in certain crises of tempta- 
tion they went overboard. Never so many 
9 



130 



Business a School. 



temptations to scoundrelism as now. Not a 
law on the statute book but has some back 
door through which a miscreant can escape. 
Ah ! how many deceptions in the fabric of 
goods ; so much plundering in commercial 
life that if a man talk about living a life of 
complete commercial accuracy there are those 
who ascribe it to greenness and lack of tact. 
More need of honesty now than ever before, 
tried honesty, complete honesty, more than in 
those times when business was a plain affair 
and woolens were , woolens and silks were silks 
and men were men. 

How many men do you suppose there are in 
commercial life who could say truthfully, 
( 4 In all the sales I have ever made I have 
never overstated the value of goods ; in all 
the sales I have ever made I have never cov- 
ered up an imperfection in the fabric ; of all 
the thousands of dollars I have ever made I 
have not taken one dishonest farthing ?" 
There are men, however, who can say it, 



Business a School. 



131 



hundreds who can say it, thousands who can 
say it They are more honest than when 
they sold their first tierce of rice, or their first 
firkin of butter, because their honesty and in- 
tegrity have been tested, tried, and came out 
triumphant. But they remember a time when 
they could have robbed a partner, or have ab- 
sconded with the funds of a bank, or sprung 
a snap judgment, or made a false assignment, 
or borrowed inimitably without any efforts at 
payment, or got a man into a sharp corner 
and fleeced him. But they never took one 
step on that pathway of hell fire. They can 
say their prayers without hearing the chink 
of dishonest dollars. They can read their 
Bible without thinking of the time when with 
a lie on their soul, in the Custom House they 
kissed the Book. They can think of death 
and the judgment that comes after it without 
any flinching — that day when all charlatans 
and cheats and jockeys and frauds shall be 
doubly damned. It does not make their knees 



132 



Business a School. 



knock together, and it does not make their 
teeth chatter to read, u As the partridge sit- 
teth on eggs, and hatcheth them not ; so he 
that getteth riches, and not by right, shall 
leave them in the midst of his days, — and at 
his end shall be a fool." 

Oh, what a school of integrity business life 
is ! If you have ever been tempted to let your 
integrity cringe before present advantage, if 
you have ever wakened up in some embarrass- 
ment, and said : ( ' Now, I' 11 step a little aside 
from the right path and no one will know it, and 
I shall come all right again ; it is only once." 
That only once has ruined tens of thou- 
sands of men for this life and blasted their 
souls for eternity. It is a tremendous school, 
business life, a school of integrity. A mer- 
chant in Liverpool got a five-pound Bank-of- 
England note, and holding it up toward the 
light he saw some interlineations in what 
seemed red ink. He finally deciphered the 
letters, and found out that the writing had 



Business a School. 



133 



been made by a slave in Algiers, saying in 
substance: u Whoever gets this bank-note 
will please to inform my brother, John Dean, 
living near Carlisle, that I am a slave of the 
Bey of Algiers. n The merchant sent word, 
employed Government officers, and found who 
this man was, spoken of in this bank bill. 
After a while the man was rescued, who for 
eleven years had been a slave of the Bey of 
Algiers. He was immediately emancipated, 
but was so worn out by hardship and exposure 
he soon after died. Oh, if some of the bank 
bills that come through your hands could tell 
all the scenes through which they have passed, 
it would be a tragedy eclipsing any drama of 
Shakespeare, mightier than King Lear or 
Macbeth. 

I am impressed with the importance of our 
having more sympathy with business men. Is 
it not a shame that we in our pulpits do not 
oftener preach about their struggles, their 
trials, and their temptations ? Men who toil 



134 



Business a School. 



with the hand are not apt to be very sympa- 
thetic with those who toil with the brain. 
The farmers who raise the corn and the oats 
and the wheat sometimes are tempted to think 
that grain merchants have an easy time, and 
get their profits without giving any equivalent. 
Plato and Aristotle were so opposed to mer- 
chandise that they declared commerce to be 
the curse of the nations, and they advised 
that cities be built at least ten miles from the 
sea-coast. But you and I know that there are 
no more industrious or high-minded men than 
those who move in the world of traffic. Some 
of them carry burdens heavier than hods of 
bricks, and are exposed to sharper things 
than the east wind, and climb mountains 
higher than the Alps or Himalayas. We talk 
about the martyrs of the Piedmont valley, 
and the martyrs among the Scotch highlands, 
and the martyrs at Oxford. There are just as 
certainly martyrs of Wall street and State 
street, martyrs of Fulton street and Broad- 



Business a School. 



135 



way, martyrs of Altantic street and Chestnut 
street, going through hotter fires, or having 
their necks under sharper axes. Then it be- 
hooves us to banish all fretfulness from our 
lives, if this subject be true. We look back 
to the time when we were at school, and we 
remember the rod, and we remember the hard 
tasks, and we complained grievously ; but 
now we see it was for the best. Business life 
is a school, and the tasks are hard, and the 
chastisements sometimes are very grievous ; 
but do not complain. The hotter the fire the 
better the refining. There are men before 
the throne of God this day in triumph who on 
earth were cheated out of even-thing but their 
coffin. They were sued, they were imprisoned 
for debt, they were throttled by constables 
with a whole pack of wits, they were sold 
out by the sheriffs, they had no compromise 
with their creditors, they had to make assign- 
ments. Their dying hours were annoyed by 
the sharp ringing of the door-bell by some 



136 



Business a School. 



impetuous creditor who thought it was out- 
rageous and impudent that a man should dare 
to die before he paid the last three shillings 
and sixpence. 

A man arose in Fulton street prayer-meet- 
ing, and said, 1 1 I wish publicly to acknowl- 
edge the goodness of God. I was in business 
trouble. I had money to pay, and I had no 
means to pay it, and I was in utter despair of 
all human help, and I laid this matter before 
the Lord, and this morning I went down 
among some old business friends I had not 
seen in many years, just to make a call, and 
one said to me, 1 Why, I am so glad to see 
you, walk in. We have some money on our 
books due you a good while, but we didn't 
know where you were, and therefore not hav- 
ing your address we could not send it. We 
are very glad you have come. ' ' ' And the 
man standing in Fulton street prayer-meeting 
said, " The amount they paid me was six 
times what I owed. ' ' You say it only hap- 



Business a School. 



137 



pened so ? You are an infidel. God answered 
that man's prayer. Oh, you want business 
grace. Commercial ethics, business honors, 
laws of trade, are all very good in their place, 
but there are times when you want something 
more than this world will give you. You 
want God. For the lack of Him some that 
you have known have consented to forge, and 
to maltreat their friends, and to curse their 
enemies, and their names have been bulletined 
among scoundrels, and they have been ground 
to powder ; while other men you have known 
have gone through the very same stress of 
circumstances triumphant. There are men 
here to-day who fought the battle and gained 
the victory. People come out of that man's 
store, and they say, " Well, if there ever 
was a Christian trader, that is one. ' ' Integrity 
kept the books and waited on the customers. 
Light from the eternal world flashed through 
the show windows. Love to God and love to 
man presided in that storehouse. Some day 



138 



Business a School. 



people going through the street notice that 
the shutters of the window are not down. 
The bar of that store door has not been re- 
moved. People say, " What is the matter? n 
You go up a little closer, and you see written 
on the card of that window : ' 4 Closed on ac- 
count of the death of one of the firm. n That 
day all through the circles of business there 
is talk about how a good man has gone. 
Boards of trade pass resolutions of sympathy, 
and churches of Christ pray, ( ' Help, Lord, 
for the godly man ceaseth." He has made 
his last bargain, he has suffered his last loss, 
he has ached with the last fatigue. His chil- 
dren will get the result of his industry, or, if 
through misfortune there be no dollars left, 
they will have an estate of prayer and Chris- 
tian example which will be everlasting. 
Heavenly rewards for earthly discipline. 
There ' 1 the wicked cease from troubling ; — 
and there the weary be at rest." 



Employer and Employee. 



greatest war the world lias ever seen 
^ is between capital and labor. The strife 
is not like that which in history is called the 
Thirty Years' War, for it is a war of centu- 
ries, it is a war of the five continents, it is a 
war hemispheric. The middle classes in this 
country, upon whom the nation has depended 
for holding the balance of power and for act- 
ing as mediators between the two extremes, 
are diminishing, and if things go on at the 
same ratio as the}* are now going, it will not 
be very long before there will be no middle 
class in this country, but all will be very rich 
or very poor, princes or paupers, and the 
country will be given up to palaces and hov- 
els. The antagonistic forces are closing in 
upon each other. Strikes and lockouts are 
only skirmishes before a general engagement, 
(i39) 



140 Employer and Employee. 



or, if you prefer it, escapes through the safety- 
valves of an imprisoned force which promises 
the explosion of society. Will this war be- 
tween capital and labor be settled by human 
wisdom ? Never. The brow of the one be- 
comes more rigid, the fist of the other more 
clenched. 

But that which human wisdom cannot 
achieve will be accomplished by Christianity 
if it be given full sway. You have heard of 
medicines so powerful that one drop would 
stop a disease and restore a patient ; and I 
have to tell you of something that properly 
administered will stop all these woes of society 
and give convalescence and complete health 
to all classes: " Whatsoever ye would that 
men should do to you, do ye even so to them. ' ' 

There will come no pacification to this 
trouble through an outcry against rich men 
merely because they are rich. There is no 
member of a trades-union on earth that would 
not be rich if he could be. Sometimes through 



Employer and Employee. 141 



a fortunate invention, or through some acci- 
dent of prosperity, one who has had nothing 
comes to large estate, and we see him arrogant 
and supercilious, and taking people by the 
throat just as other people took him by the 
throat. There is something very mean about 
human nature when it comes to the top. But 
it is no more a sin to be rich than it is a sin 
to be poor. There are those who have 
gathered great estate through fraud, and then 
there are millionaires who have gathered their 
fortune through foresight in regard to changes 
in the markets, and through brilliant business 
faculty, and every dollar of their estate is as 
honest as the dollar which the plumber gets 
for mending a pipe, or the mason gets for 
building a wall. There are those who are 
kept in poverty because of their own fault. 
They might have been well off, but they 
smoked or chewed up their earnings, or they 
lived beyond their means, while others on the 
same wages and on the same salaries went on 



142 Employer and Employee, 



to competency. I know a man who is all the 
time complaining of his poverty and crying- 
out against rich men, while he himself keeps 
two dogs, and chews and smokes, and is filled 
to the chin with whiskey and beer ! 

Micawber said to David Copperfield : ' 1 Cop- 
perfield, my boy, one pound income, twenty 
shillings and sixpence expenses ; result, mis- 
ery. But, Copperfield, my boy, one pound 
income, expenses nineteen shillings and six- 
pence ; result, happiness. " And there are vast 
multitudes of people who are kept poor be- 
cause they are the victims of their improvi- 
dence. It is no sin to be rich, and it is no 
sin to be poor. I protest against this outcry 
which I hear against those who, through econ- 
omy and self-denial and assiduity, have come 
to large fortune. This bombardment of com- 
mercial success will never stop the quarrel 
between capital and labor. 

Neither will the contest be settled by cyni- 
cal and unsympathetic treatment of the labor- 



Employer and Employee, 143 

ing classes. There are those who speak of 
them as though they were only cattle or 
draught horses. Their nerves are nothing, 
their domestic comfort is nothing, their hap- 
piness is nothing. They have no more sym- 
pathy for them than a hound has for a hare, 
or a hawk for a hen, or a tiger for a calf. 
They have all their sympathies with Shy lock, 
and not with Antonio and Portia. They are 
plutocrats and their feelings are infernal. 
They are filled with irritation and irascibility 
on this subject. To stop the awful embroglio 
between capital and labor they will lift not so 
much as the tip end of the little finger. 

Neither will there be any pacification of this 
angry controversy through violence. Traps 
sprung suddenly upon employers, and vio- 
lence, never took one knot out of the knuckle 
of toil, or put one farthing of wages into a 
callous palm. Barbarism will never cure the 
wrongs of civilization. Mark that. 

Frederick the Great admired some land near 



144 Employer and Employee, 



his palace at Potsdam, and lie resolved to get it. 
It was owned by a miller. He offered the 
miller three times the value of the property. 
The miller would not take it, because it was 
the old homestead, and he felt as Naboth felt 
about his vineyard when Ahab wanted it. 
Frederick the Great was a rough and terrible 
man, and he ordered the miller into his pres- 
ence ; and the king, with a stick in his hand — 
a stick with which he sometimes struck his 
officers of state — said to this miller : ( 1 Now, I 
have offered you three times the value of that 
property, and if you won't sell it I'll take it 
anyhow." The miller said, " Your Majesty, 
you won't." u Yes," said the king, u I will 
take it." "Then," said the miller, "if your 
Majesty does take it, I will sue you in the 
Chancery Court." At that threat Frederick 
the Great yielded his infamous demand. And 
the most imperious outrage against the poor 
and against the working-classes will yet 
cower before the law. Violence and what else 



Employer and Employee. 



145 



is contrary to the law will never accomplish 
anything, but righteousness and that which is 
according to law will accomplish it. 

. The controversy between capital and labor 
cannot be settled by human wisdom, but, ro- 
seate and jubilant, the Golden Rule puts one 
hand on the broadcloth shoulder of Capital, 
and puts the other hand on the homespun- 
covered shoulder of Toil, and says, 1 i What- 
soever ye would that men should do to you, 
do ye even so to them." That is, the lady 
of the household will say, " I must treat the 
maid in the kitchen just as I would like to be 
treated if I were down-stairs and it were my 
work to wash, and cook, and sweep, and it 
were the duty of the maid in the kitchen to 
preside in this parlor. n The maid in the 
kitchen must say, * 1 If my employer seems to 
be more prosperous than I, that is no fault of 
hers ; I shall not treat her as an enemy. I 
will have the same industry and fidelity down- 
stairs as I would expect from my subordinates 

IO 



146 Employer and Employee. 

if I happened to be the wife of a silk impor- 
ter." The owner of an iron mill will go into 
his foundry and, passing into what is called 
the puddling-room, he will see a man there 
stripped to the waist, and besweated and ex- 
hausted with the labor and the toil, and he 
will say to him, ' 4 Why, it seems to be very 
hot in here, You look very much exhausted. 
I hear your child is sick with scarlet fever. If 
you want your wages a little earlier this week, 
so as to pay the nurse and get the medicines, 
just come into my office any time." 

After a while, crash goes the money mar- 
ket, and there is no more demand for the ar- 
ticles manufactured in that iron mill, and the 
owner does not know what to do. He says, 
" Shall I stop the mill, or shall I run it on 
half time, or shall I cut down the men's 
wages ? ' ' He walks the floor of his counting- 
room all day, hardly knowing what to do. 
Toward evening he calls all the laborers 
together. They stand all around, some with 



Employer and Employee. 147 

arms akimbo, some with folded arms, wonder- 
ing what the boss is going to do now. The 
manufacturer says, ' 4 Men, times are very 
hard ; I don't make twenty dollars where I 
used to make one hundred. Somehow, there 
is no demand now for what we manufacture, or 
but very little demand. You see I am at vast 
expense, and I have called you together this af- 
ternoon to see what you would advise. I don't 
want to shut up the mill, because that would 
force you out of work, and you have always 
been very faithful, and I like you, and you 
seem to like me, and the bairns must be 
looked after, and your wife will after a while 
want a new dress. I don't know what to do." 

There is a dead halt for a minute or two, 
and then one of the workmen steps out from 
the ranks of his fellows, and says, "Boss, 
you have been very good to us, and when you 
prospered we prospered, and now you are in a 
tight place and I am sorry, and we have got 
to sympathize with you. I don't know how 



148 Employer and Employee. 

the others feel, but I propose that we take off 
twenty per cent, from our wages, and then 
when the times get good you will remember 
us and raise them again." The workman 
looks around to his comrades, and says, 
( 4 Boys, what do you say to this ? All in favor 
of my proposition will say ay. n " Ay ! ay ! 
ay ! " shout two hundred voices. 

But the mill-owner, getting in some new 
machinery, exposes himself very much, and 
takes cold, and it settles into pneumonia, and 
he dies. In the procession to the tomb are all 
the workmen, tears rolling down their cheeks, 
and off upon the ground ; but an hour before 
the procession gets to the cemetery the wives 
and the children of those workmen are at the 
grave waiting for the arrival of the funeral 
pageant. The minister of religion may have 
delivered an eloquent eulogium before they 
started from the house, but the most impres- 
sive things are said that day by the working- 
classes standing around the tomb. That night 



Employer and Employee. 149 



in all the cabins of the working-people where 
they have family prayers the widowhood and 
the orphanage in the mansion are remem- 
bered. No glaring populations look over the 
iron fence of the cemetery ; but, hovering 
over the scene, the benediction of God and 
man is coming from the fulfilment of the 
Christlike injunction, " Whatsoever ye would 
that men should do to you, do ye even so to 
them." 

"Oh," says some man here, "that is all 
Utopian, that is apocryphal, that is impos- 
sible. ' ' No. I will show you factories, bank- 
ing-houses, storehouses, and costly enterprises 
where the Golden Rule is fully kept, and you 
could no more get the employer to practice an 
injustice upon his men, or the men to con- 
spire against the employer, than you could get 
your right hand and your left hand, your right 
eye and your left eye, your right ear and your 
left ear, into physiological antagonism. Now, 
where is this to begin ? In our homes, in our 



150 Employer and Employee, 

stores, on our farms — not waiting for other 
people to do their duty. Is there a divergence 
now between the parlor and the kitchen ? 
Then there is something wrong, either in the 
parlor or the kitchen, perhaps in both. Are 
the clerks in your store irate against the firm ? 
Then there is something wrong, either behind 
the counter or in the private office, or per- 
haps in both. 

The great want of the world to-day is the 
fulfilment of the Christlike injunction I have 
quoted: " Whatsoever ye would that men 
should do to you, do ye even so to them." All 
the political economists under the arch or vault 
of the heavens in convention for a thousand 
years cannot settle this controversy between 
monopoly and hard work, between capital and 
labor. During the Revolutionary War there 
was a heavy piece of timber to be lifted, per- 
haps for some fortress, and a corporal was 
overseeing the work, and he was giving com- 
mands to some soldiers as they lifted : 4 ' Heave 



Employer and Employee. 151 

away, there ! yo heave ! " Well, the timber 
was too heavy ; they could not get it up. 
There was a gentleman riding by on a horse, 
and he stopped and said to this corporal, 
" Why don't you help them lift? That tim- 
ber is too heavy for them to lift. " "No," 
he said, "I won't; lam a corporal." The 
gentleman got off his horse and came up to 
the place. ( * Now, ' ' he said to the soldiers, 
44 all together — yo heave!" and the timber 
went to its place. u Now," said the gentle- 
man to the corporal, " when you have a piece 
of timber too heavy for the men to lift, and 
you want help, you send to your commander- 
in-chief. ' ' It was Washington. Now, that is 
about all the Gospel I know — the Gospel of 
giving somebody a lift, a lift out of darkness, 
a lift out of earth into heaven. That is all 
the Gospel I know — the Gospel of helping 
somebody else to lift. 

u Oh," says some wiseacre, "talk as you 
will, the law of supply and demand will regu- 



152 Employer and Employee. 

late these things until the end of time. ' 5 No, 
they will not, unless God dies and the bat- 
teries of the Judgment Day are spiked, and 
Pluto and Proserpine, king and queen of the 
infernal regions, take full possession of this 
world. Do you know who Supply & Demand 
are ? They have gone into partnership, and 
they propose to swindle this earth, and are 
swindling it. You are drowning. Supply & 
Demand stand on the shore, one on one side, 
the other on the other side of the life-boat, 
and they cry out to you, ( ' Now, you pay us 
what we ask you for getting you to shore, or 
go to the bottom ! " If you can borrow $5000 
you can keep from failing in business. Sup- 
ply & Demand say, 1 1 Now, you pay us exorbi- 
tant usury, or you go into bankruptcy. ' ' This 
robber firm of Supply & Demand say to you, 
u The crops are short. We bought up all the 
wheat and it is in our bin. Now, you pay 
our price or starve. ' ' That is your magnificent 
law of supply and demand. Supply & De- 



Employer and Employee. 153 



mand own the largest mill on earth, and all 
the rivers roll over their wheel, and into their 
hopper they put all the men, women, and 
children they can shovel out of the centuries, 
and the blood and the bones redden the valley 
while the mill grinds. That diabolic law of 
supply and demand will yet have to stand aside 
and instead thereof will come the law of love, 
the law of co-operation, the law of kindness, 
the law of sympathy, the law of Christ. Have 
you no idea of the coming of such a time ? 
Then you do not believe the Bible. All the 
Bible is full of promises on this subject, and 
as the ages roll on the time will come when 
men of fortune will be giving larger sums to 
humanitarian and evangelistic purposes, and 
there will be more James Lenoxes and Peter 
Coopers and William E. Dodges and George 
Peabodys. As that time comes there will be 
more parks, more picture-galleries, more gar- 
dens thrown open for the holiday people and 
the working-classes. The time is going to 



154 



Employer and Employee. 



come when, if you have anything in your 
house worth looking at — pictures, pieces of 
sculpture — you are going to invite me to 
come and see it, you are going to invite my 
friends to come and see it, and you will say, 
4 i See what I have been blessed with. God 
has given me this, and so far as enjoying it, 
it is yours also." That is Gospel. 

In crossing the Allegheny Mountains many 
years ago the stage halted, and Henry Clay 
dismounted from the stage, and went out on a 
rock at the very verge of the cliff, and he 
stood there with his cloak wrapped around 
him, and he seemed to be listening for some- 
thing. Some one said to him, "What are 
you listening for?" Standing there on the 
top of the mountain, he said, * ( I am listening 
to the tramp of the footsteps of the coming 
millions of this continent." A sublime pos- 
ture for an American statesman. You and 
I to-day stand on the mountain top of privi- 
lege, and on the Rock of Ages, and we look 



Employer a) id Employee. 



155 



off, and we hear coining from the future the 
happy industries, and the smiling popula- 
tions, and the consecrated fortunes, and the 
innumerable prosperities of the closing nine- 
teenth and the opening twentieth centuries. 

The greatest friend of capitalist and toiler, 
and the one who will yet bring them together 
in complete accord, was born one Christmas 
night, while the curtains of heaven swung, 
stirred by the wings angelic. Owner of all 
things — all the continents, all worlds, and all 
the islands of light. Capitalist of immensity, 
crossing over to our condition. Coming into 
our world, not by gate of palace, but by door of 
barn. Spending His first night amid the shep- 
herds. Gathering afterward around Him the 
fishermen to be His chief attendants. With 
adze, and saw, and chisel, and axe, and in a 
carpenter-shop, showing Himself brother with 
the tradesmen. Owner of all things, and yet 
on a hillock back of Jerusalem one day re- 
signing everything for others, keeping not so 



156 Employer ancP Employee. 

much as a shekel to pay for His obsequies, by 
charity buried in the suburbs of a city that 
had cast Him out Before the. cross of such 
a capitalist, and such a carpenter, all men can 
afford to shake hands and worship. Here is 
the every man's Christ. None so high, but 
He was higher. None so poor, but He was 
poorer. At His feet the hostile extremes will 
yet renounce their animosities, and counte- 
nances which have glowered with the preju- 
dices and revenge of centuries shall brighten 
with the smile of heaven as He commands : 
4 4 Whatsoever ye would that men should do to 
you, do ye even so to them. ' ' 



The EHirden^Bearer. 



T^HIS is a world of burden-bearing. Where 
^ is the man who has not a conflict? 
Where is the soul that has not a struggle ? 
In the far East wells of water are so infre- 
quent that when a man owns a well he has a 
property of very great value, and sometimes 
battles have been fought for the possession of 
one w r ell of water ; but there is one well that 
every man owns, a deep well, a perennial 
well, a well of tears. If a man has not a 
burden on this shoulder, he has a burden on 
the other shoulder. The day I left home to 
look after myself and for myself, in the wagon 
my father sat driving, and he said that day 
something which has kept with me all my 
life : " DeWitt, it is always safe to trust God. 
I have many a time come to a crisis of diffi- 
culty. You may know that, having been sick 
(157) 



158 The Burden- Bearer. 



for fifteen years, it was no easy thing for me to 
support a family ; but always God came to the 
rescue. I remember the time," he said, 
" when I didn't know what to do, and I saw 
a man on horseback riding up the farm lane, 
and he announced to me that I had been 
nominated for the most lucrative office in the 
gift of the people of the county ; and to that 
office I was elected, and God in that way met 
all my wants, and I tell you it is always safe 
to trust him." What we want is a practical 
religion I The religion people have is so 
high up you cannot reach it. I had a friend 
who entered the life of an evangelist. He 
gave up a lucrative business in Chicago, and 
he and his wife finally came to severe want. 
He told me that in the morning at prayers he 
said, u O lyord, thou knowest we have not a 
mouthful of food in the house ! Help me, 
help us ! " And he started out on the street, 
and a gentleman met him and said, ( ( I have been 
thinking of you for a good while. You know 



The Burden- Bearer. 



159 



I am a flour merchant ; if you won't be of- 
fended, I should like to send you a barrel of 
flour. ' 1 My friend cast his burden on the 
Lord, and the Lord sustained him. In the 
Straits of Magellan, I have been told, there is 
a place where whichever way a ship captain 
puts his ship he finds the wind against him, 
and there are men who all their lives have 
been running in the teeth of the wind, and 
which way to turn they do not know. I ad- 
dress these face to face, not perfunctorily, but 
as one brother talks to another brother : 1 1 Cast 
thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sus- 
tain thee. ' ' 

There are a great many men who have 
business burdens. When we see a man har- 
ried and perplexed and annoyed in business 
life, we are apt to say, 1 4 He ought not to 
have attempted to carry so much. ' Ah, that 
man may not be to blame at all. When a 
man plants a business be does not know what 
will be its outgrowths, what will be its roots, 



160 



The Burden- Bearer. 



what will be its branches. There is many a 
man with keen foresight and large business 
faculty who has been flung into the dust by 
unforeseen circumstances springing upon him 
from ambush. When to buy, when to sell, 
when to trust, and to what amount of credit, 
what will be the effect of this new invention 
of machinery, what will be the effect of that 
loss of crop, and a thousand other questions 
perplex business men, until the hair is sil- 
vered and deep wrinkles are plowed in the 
cheek ; and the stocks go up by the moun- 
tains and go down by the valleys, and they 
are at their wits' ends, and stagger like 
drunken men. 

There never has been a time when there 
have been such rivalries in business as now. 
It is hardware against hardware, books against 
books, chandlery against chandlery, imported 
article against imported article. A thousand 
stores in combat with another thousand stores. 
Never such advantage of light, never such 



The Burden-Bearer. 



161 



variety of assortment, never so much splen- 
dor of show window, never so much adroit- 
ness of salesmen, never so much acuteness of 
advertising, and amid all these severities of 
rivalry in business, how many men break 
down ! Oh, the burden on the shoulder ! 
Oh, the burden on the heart ! You hear that 
it is avarice which drives these men of busi- 
ness through the street, and that is the com- 
monly accepted idea. I do not believe a word 
of it. The vast multitude of these business 
men are toiling on for others. To educate 
their children, to put the wing of protection 
over their households, to have something left 
so that when they pass out of life their wives 
and children will not have to go to the poor 
house — that is the way I translate this energy 
in the street and store, the largest part of 
that energy. Grip, Gouge & Co. , do not do all 
the business. Some of us remember when 
the Central America was coming home from 
California, it was wrecked. President Arthur's 
ii 



162 



The Bwden- Bearer. 



father-in-law was the heroic captain of that 
ship, and went down with most of the passen- 
gers. Some of them got off into life-boats, 
but there was a young man returning from 
California who had a bag of gold in his hand; 
and as the last boat shoved off from the ship 
that was to go down, that man shouted to a 
comrade in the boat, 4 4 Here, John, catch this 
gold ; there are three thousand dollars ; take 
it home to my old mother, it will make her 
comfortable in her last days. n Grip, Gouge 
& Co. do not do all the business of the world. 
Ah ! my friend, do you say that God does not 
care anything about your worldly business ? 
I tell you God knows more about it than you 
do. He knows all your perplexities ; He 
knows what mortgagee is about to foreclose ; 
He knows what note you cannot pay, He 
knows what unsalable goods you have on your 
shelves ; He knows all your trials, from the 
day you took hold of the first yard-stick, 
down to the sale of the last yard of ribbon ; 



The Burdeyi- Bearer. 



163 



and the God who helped David to be king, 
and who helped Daniel to be prime minister, 
and who helped Havelock to be a soldier will 
help you to discharge all your duties. He is 
going to see you through. When loss comes, 
and you find your property going, just take 
God's Book and put it down by your ledger, 
and read of the eternal possessions that will 
come to you through our Lord Jesus Christ. 
And w r hen your business partner betrays you, 
and your friends turn against you, just take 
the insulting letter, put it down on the table, 
put your Bible beside the insulting letter, and 
then read of the friendship of Him w T ho 
"sticketh closer than a brother.'' 

A young accountant in New York City got 
his accounts entangled. He knew he was 
honest, and yet he could not make his ac- 
counts come out right, and he toiled at them 
day and night until he was nearly frenzied. 
It seemed by those books that something had 
been misappropriated, and he knew before 



164 



The Burden-Bearer. 



God he was honest. The last day came. He 
knew if he could not that day make his ac- 
counts come out right, he should go into dis- 
grace and go into banishment from the busi- 
ness establishment. He went over there very 
early before there was anybody in the place, 
and he knelt down at the desk and said, u Oh, 
Lord, thou knowest I have tried to be honest, 
but I cannot make these things come out 
right ! Help me to-day — help me this morn- 
ing ! " The young man arose, and hardly 
knowing why he did so opened a book that 
lay on the desk, and there was a leaf contain- 
ing a line of figures which explained every- 
thing. In other words, he cast his burden 
upon the Lord, and the Lord sustained him. 
Young man, do you hear that ? Oh, yes, God 
has a sympathy with anybody that is in any 
kind of toil ! He knows how heavy is the 
hod of bricks that the workman carries up 
the ladder of the wall ; He hears the pickaxe 
of the miner down in the coal shaft ; He knows 



The Burden- Bearer. 



165 



how strong the tempest strikes the sailor at 
mast-head ; He sees the factory girl among the 
spindles, and knows how her arms ache ; He 
sees the sewing woman in the fourth story, 
and knows how few pence she gets for mak- 
ing a garment ; and louder than all the din 
and roar of the city comes the voice of a sym- 
pathetic God: " Cast thy burden upon the 
Lord, and He shall sustain thee. J ' 

There are a great many who have a weight 
of persecution and abuse upon them. Some- 
times society gets a grudge against a man. 
All his motives are misinterpreted and his 
good deeds are depreciated. With more vir- 
tue than some of the honored and applauded, he 
runs only against raillery and sharp criticism. 
When a man begins to go down, he has not 
only the force of natural gravitation, but a 
hundred hands to help him in the precipita- 
tion. Men are persecuted for their virtues 
and their successes. Germanicus said he had 
just as many bitter antagonists as he had 



186 



The Burden- Bearer. 



adornments. The character sometimes is so 
lustrous that the weak eyes of envy and jeal- 
ousy cannot bear to look at it It was their 
integrity that put Joseph in the pit, and Dan- 
iel in the den, and Shadrach in the fire, and 
sent John the Evangelist to desolate Patmos, 
and Calvin to the castle of persecution, and 
John Huss to the stake, and Korah after 
Moses, and Saul after David, and Herod after 
Christ. Be sure if you have anything to do 
for Church or State, and you attempt it with 
all your soul, the lightning will strike you. 
The world always has had a cross between 
two thieves for the one who comes to save it. 
High and holy enterprise has always been 
followed by abuse. The most sublime tragedy 
of self-sacrifice has come to burlesque. The 
graceful gait of virtue is always followed by 
grimace and travesty. The sweetest strain of 
poetry ever written has come to ridiculous 
parody, and as long as there are virtue and 
righteousness in the world, there will be 



The Burden- Bearer, 



167 



something for iniquity to grin at. All along 
the line of the ages, and in all lands, the cry 
has been, 1 ' Not this man, but Barabbas. 
Now, Barabbas was a robber. " And what 
makes the persecutions of life worse, is that 
they come from people whom you have helped, 
from those to whom you have loaned money 
or have started in business, or whom you res- 
cued in some great crisis. I think it has been 
the history of all our lives — the most acri- 
monious assault has come from those whom 
we have benefited, whom we have helped, and 
that makes it all the harder to bear. A 
man is in danger of becoming cynical. 

A clergyman of the Universalist Church 
went into a neighborhood for the establish- 
ment of a church of his denomination, and 
he was anxious to find some one of that de- 
nomination, and he was pointed to a certain 
house, and went there. He said to the man 
of the house, ' ( I understand you are a Uni- 
versalist ; I want you to help me in the enter- 



168 



The Burden- Bearer. 



prise. " "Well," said the man, "I am a 
Universalist, but I have a peculiar kind of 
Universalism. " u What is that ? ' ' asked the 
minister. ' c Well, ' ' replied the other, 1 4 1 have 
been out in the world, and I have been cheated 
and slandered and outraged and abused until 
I believe in universal damnation ! * ' The 
great danger is that men will become cynical 
and given to believe, as David was tempted to 
say, that all men are liars. Do not let that 
be the effect upon your souls. If you cannot 
endure a little persecution, how do you think 
our fathers endured great persecution ? Mot- 
ley, in his " Dutch Republic," tells us of 
Egmont, the martyr, who, condemned to be 
beheaded, unfastened his collar on the way to 
the scaffold ; and when they asked him why 
he did that, he said, 4 ' So they will not be 
detained in their work ; I want to be ready. ' ' 
How little we have to endure compared with 
those who have gone before us ! 

Now, if you have come across ill-treatment, 



The Burden- Bearer, 



169 



let me tell you you are in excellent company 
— Christ and Luther and Galileo and Colum- 
bus and John Jay and Josiah Quincy and 
thousands of men and women, the best spirits 
of earth and heaven. Budge not one inch, 
though all hell wreak upon you its vengeance, 
and you be made a target for devils to shoot 
at. 4 1 Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He 
shall sustain thee. n 

There are others who carry great burdens 
of physical ailments. When sudden sickness 
has come, and fierce choleras and malignant 
fevers take the castles of life by storm, we ap- 
peal to God ; but in these chronic ailments 
which wear out the strength day after day, 
and week after week, and year after year, 
how little resorting to God for solace ! Then 
people depend upon their tonics and their 
plasters and their cordials rather than upon 
heavenly stimulants. How few people there 
are completely well ! Some of you by dint of 
perseverance and care, have kept living to 



170 The Burden- Bearer. 



this time ; but how you have had to war 
against physical ailments ! Antediluvians, 
without medical college and infirmary and 
apothecary shop, multiplied their years by 
hundreds ; but he who has gone through the 
gauntlet of disease in- our time, and has come 
to seventy years of age, is a hero worthy of a 
palm. The world seems to be a great hospital, 
and you run against rheumatisms and con- 
sumptions and scrofulas and neuralgias and 
scores of old diseases baptized by new nomen- 
clature. And how heavy a burden sickness 
is ! It takes the color out of the sky and the 
sparkle out of the wave and the sweetness 
out of the fruit and the lustre out of the 
night. When the limbs ache, when the res- 
piration is painful, when the mouth is hot, 
when the ear roars with unhealthy obstruc- 
tions, how hard it is to be patient and cheer- 
ful and assiduous ! While you are in every 
possible way to try to restore your physical 
vigor you are to remember that more sooth- 



The Burden- Bearer. 



171 



ing than any anodyne, and more vitalizing 
than any stimulant, and more strengthen- 
ing than any tonic is the prescription : 4 i Cast 
thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sus- 
tain thee. n We hear a great deal of talk now 
about faith cure, and some people say it can- 
not be done and it is a failure. I do not know 
but that the chief advance of the Church is 
to be in that direction. Marvellous things 
come to me day by day which make me think 
that if the age of miracle is past, it is because 
the faith of miracles is past. 

Some have to carry the burden of bereave- 
ments. Ah ! these are the troubles that wear 
us out. If we lose our property, by additional 
industry, perhaps, we may bring back the es- 
tranged fortune ; if we lose our good name, 
perhaps by reformation of morals we may 
achieve again reputation for integrity ; but 
who will bring back the dear departed ? Alas 
for these empty cradles and these trunks of 
childish toys that will never be used again ! 



172 



The Burden- Bearer. 



Alas for the empty chair and the silence in 
the halls that will never echo again to those 
familiar footsteps ! Alas for the cry of widow- 
hood and orphanage ! What bitter Marahs in 
the wilderness, what cities of the dead, what 
long black shadow from the wing of death, 
what eyes snnken with grief, what hands 
tremnlous with bereavement, what instru- 
ments of music shut now because there are 
no fingers to play on them ! Is there no relief 
for such souls ? Ay ; the grave is brighter 
than the ancient tomb where the lights were 
perpetually kept burning. The scarred feet 
of Him who was ' 1 the resurrection and the 
life" are on the broken grave hillock, while 
the voices of angels ring down the sky at the 
coronation of another soul come home to 
glory. 

There are many who carry the burden of sin. 
We all carry it until in the appointed way 
that burden is lifted. We need no Bible to 
prove that the whole race is ruined. What a 



The Burden- Bearer. 



173 



spectacle it would be if we could tear off the 
mask of human defilement, or beat a drum 
that would bring up the whole army of the 
world's transgressions — the deception, the 
fraud and the rapine and the murder and the 
crime of all the centuries ! If I could sound 
the trumpet of resurrection in the soul of the 
best men in this audience, and all the dead 
sins of the past should come up, we could 
not endure the sight. Sin, grim and dire, 
has put its clutch upon the immortal soul, 
and that clutch will never relax unless it be 
under the heel of Him who came to destroy 
the works of the devil. Oh, to have a moun- 
tain of sin on the soul ! Is there no way to 
have the burden moved ? Oh, yes. ( 4 Cast thy 
burden upon the Lord." The sinless One 
came to take the consequences of our sin ! 
Why will prodigals live on swine's husks 
when the robe and the ring and the father's 
welcome are ready ? Why go wandering over 
the great Sahara Desert of your sin when you 



174 



The Burden- Bearer. 



are invited to the gardens of God, the trees of 
life, and the fountains of living water? Why 
be houseless and homeless forever when you 
may become the sons and daughters of the 
Lord God Almighty ? 



Life's Echoes. 



GREEK mythology represented the echo as 
a nymph, the daughter of Earth and 
Air, following Narcissus through forests and 
into grottoes and even" whither, and so strange 
and weird and startling is the echo I do not 
wonder that the superstitious have lifted it 
into the supernatural. You and I in boyhood 
or girlhood experimented with this respon- 
siveness of sound. Standing half-way be- 
tween the house and barn, we shouted many 
a time to hear the reverberations, or out 
among the mountains back of our home, on 
some long tramp, we stopped and made ex- 
clamation with full lungs just to hear "the 
sounding again of the mountains." The 
echo has frightened many a child and many 
a man. It is no tame thing after you have 
spoken to hear the same words repeated by 
(175) 



176 



Life's Echoes. 



the invisible. All the silences are filled with 
voices ready to answer. Yet, it would not be 
so startling if they said something else, but 
why do those lips of the air say just what you 
say ? Do they mean to mock or mean to 
please ? Who are you and where are you, 
thou wondrous echo ? Sometimes its response 
is a reiteration. The shot of a gun, the clap- 
ping of the hands, the beating of a drum, the 
voice of a violin are sometimes repeated many 
times by the echo ; as near Coblentz, where 
each sound has seventeen echoes. In 1766, 
a writer says that near Milan, Italy, there 
were seventy such reflections of sound to 
one snap of a pistol. Play a bugle near a lake 
of Killarney and the tune is played back to you 
as distinctly as when you played it. There 
is a well two hundred and ten feet deep at 
Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight. 
Drop a pin into that well, and the sound of 
its fall comes to the top of the well distinctly. 
A blast of an Alpine horn comes back from 



Life's Echoes. 177 

the rocks of Jungfrau in surge after surge of 
reflected sound, until it seems as if every 
peak had lifted and blown an Alpine horn. 
But have you noticed that this echo in the 
natural world has its analogy in the moral 
and religious world ? Have you noticed the 
tremendous fact that what we say and do 
comes back in recoiled gladness or disaster? 

Parental teaching and example have their 
echo in the character of descendants. Ex- 
ceptions ? Oh, yes. So in the natural world 
there may be no echo, or a distorted echo, by 
reason of peculiar proximities, but the general 
rule is that the character of the children is the 
echo of the character of parents. The general 
rule is that good parents have good children 
and bad parents have bad children. If the 
old man is a crank, his son is apt to be a 
crank, and the grandchild a crank. The ten- 
dency is so mighty in that direction that it 
will get worse and worse unless some hero or 
heroine in that line shall rise and say, ' 1 Here 1 

12 



178 



Life's Echoes, 



By the help of God, I will stand this no 
longer. Against this hereditary tendency to 
queerness I protest. ' ' And he or she will set 
up an altar and a magnificent life that will 
reverse things and there will be no more 
cranks among that kindred. In another 
family the father and mother are consecrated 
people. What they do is right; what they 
teach is right. The boys may for some time 
be wild and the daughters worldly, but watch. 
Years pass on, perhaps ten years, twenty 
years, and you go back to the church where 
the father and mother used to be consistent 
members. You have heard nothing about 
the family for twenty years, and at the door 
of the church you see the sexton, and you 
ask him, " Where is old Mr. Webster?" 
u Oh! he has been dead many years." 
< ' Where is Mrs. Webster 7" " Oh ! she died 
fifteen years ago. " " I suppose their son Joe 
went to the dogs ? " " Oh ! no, ' ' says the 
sexton. " He is up there in the elders' seat 



Life's Echoes. 



179 



He is one of our best and most important 
members. You ought to hear him pray and 
sing. He is not Joe any longer; he is Elder 
Webster." "Well, where is the daughter, 
Mary ? I suppose she is the same thought- 
less butterfly she used to be?" u Oh ! no, ' 1 
says the sexton, u she is the President of 
our Missionary Society and a director in the 
Orphan Asylum, and when she goes down the 
street all the ragamuffins take hold of her 
dress and cry, k Auntie, when are you going 
to bring us some more books and shoes and 
things ? 1 And, when, in times of revival, 
there is some hard case back in a church pew 
that no one else can touch, she goes where he 
is, and in one minute she has him a-crying, 
and the first thing we know she is fetching 
the hardened man up to the front to be prayed 
for, and says, 4 Here is a brother who w r ants 
to find the way into the kingdom of God.' 
And if nobody seems ready to pray, she kneels 
down in the aisle beside him and says, 1 Oh ! 



180 



Life's Echoes, 



Ivord! ' with a pathos and a power and a tri- 
umph that seems instantly to emancipate the 
hardened sinner. Oh! no, you must not call 
her a thoughtless butterfly in our presence. 
You see we would not stand it. ' ' The fact is 
that the son and daughter of that family did 
not promise much at the start, but they are 
now an echo, a glorious echo, a prolonged 
echo, of parental teaching and example. 

A Vermont mother, as her boy was about 
to start for a life on the sea, said, " Edward, 
I have never seen the ocean, but I understand 
the great temptation is strong drink. Promise 
me you will never touch it." Many years 
after that, telling of this in a meeting, Edward 
said : u I gave that promise to mother, and 
have been around the world, and at Calcutta, 
the ports of the Mediterranean, San Francisco, 
Cape of Good Hope, and North and South 
Poles, and never saw a glass of liquor in all 
those years that my mother's form did not ap- 
pear before me, and I do not know how liquor 



Life's Echoes. 



181 



tastes. I never have tasted it, and all because 
of the promise I made to my mother. ' ' This 
was the result of that conversation at the gate 
of the Vermont farm-house. 

But, here is a slip-shod home. The par- 
ents are a godless pair. They let their chil- 
dren do as they please. No example fit to 
follow. No lessons of morality or religion. 
Sunday no better than any other day. The 
Bible no better than any other book. The 
house is a sort of inn where the older and 
younger people of the household stop for 
a while. The theory acted on, though per- 
haps not announced, is, u The children will 
have to do as I did, and take their chances. 
Life is a lottery anyhow, and some draw prizes 
and some draw blanks, and we will trust to 
luck. 1 1 Skip twenty years and come back to 
the neighborhood where that family used to 
live. You meet on the street or on the road 
an old inhabitant of that neighborhood, and 
you say, 1 i Can you tell me anything about 



182 



Life's Echoes. 



the Petersons who used to live here ? n 4 ( Yes, ' ' 
says the old inhabitant, U I remember them 
very well. The father and mother have been 
dead for years. n u Well, how about the chil- 
dren ? What has become of them ? ' ' The 
old inhabitant replies, \ 4 They turned out 
badly. You know the old man was about 
half an infidel and the boys were all infidels. 
The oldest son married, but got into drinking 
habits, and in a few years his wife was not 
able to live with him any longer and his chil- 
dren were taken by relatives, and he died of 
delirium tremens on BlackwelPs Island. His 
other son forged the name of his employer and 
fled to Canada. One of the daughters of the 
old folks married an inebriate with the idea of 
reforming him, and you know how that al- 
ways ends — in the ruin of both the experi- 
menter and the one experimented with. The 
other daughter disappeared mysteriously, and 
has not been heard of. There was a young 
woman picked out of the East River and put 



Life 's Echoes. 



183 



in the Morgue, and some thought it was she, 
but I cannot say. " u Is it possible ? 1 1 you cry 
out. "Yes, it is possible. The family is a 
complete wreck." My hearers that is just 
what might have been expected. All this is 
only the echo, the dismal echo, the awful 
echo, the dreadful echo of parental obliquity 
and unfaithfulness. The old folks heaped up 
a mountain of wrong influences, and this is 
only "the sounding again of the mountains." 
Indeed our entire behavior in this world will 
have a resound. While opportunities fly in a 
straight line and just touch us once and are 
gone never to return, the wrongs we practice 
upon others fly in a circle, and they come back 
to the place from which they started. 

So, also, the Judgment Day will be an echo 
of all our other days. The universe needs 
such a day, for there are so many things in 
the world that need to be fixed up and ex- 
plained. If God had not appointed such a 
day all the nations would cry out, 11 O ! God, 



184 



Life's Echoes. 



give us a Judgment Day. ' ' But we are apt 
to think of it and speak about it as a day away 
off in the future, having no special connection 
with this day or any other day. The fact is 
that we are now making up its voices ; its 
trumpets will only sound back again to us 
what we now say and do. That is the mean- 
ing of all that Scripture which says that Christ 
will on that day address the soul, saying, ( 4 1 
was naked and ye clothed me, I was sick and 
in prison and ye visited me. ' ' All the foot- 
steps in that prison corridor as the Christian 
Reformer walks to the wicket of the incar- 
cerated, yea all the whispers of condolence in 
the ear of that poor soul dying in that garret, 
yea all the kindnesses are being caught up and 
rolled on until they dash against the Judgment 
Throne and then they will be struck back into 
the ears of these sons and daughters of mercy. 
Louder than the crash of Mount Washington 
falling on its face in the world-wide catastro- 
phe, and the boiling of the sea over the fur- 



Life's Echoes. 



185 



naces of universal conflagration will be the 
echo and re-echo of the good deeds done and 
the sympathetic words uttered and the mighty 
benefactions wrought. On that day all the 
charities, all the self-sacrifices, all the philan- 
thropies, all the beneficent last wills and tes- 
taments, all the Chiistian work of all the 
ages, will be piled up into mountains, and 
those who have served God and served the 
suffering human race will hear " the sounding* 
again of the mountains. ' ' 

Eternity itself is only an echo of time. 
Mind you, the analogy warrants my saying 
this. The echo is not always exactly in kind 
like the sound originally projected. I^ord 
Raleigh says that a woman's voice sounding 
from a grove was returned an octave higher. 
A scientist playing a flute in Fairfax County, 
Va., found that all the notes w r ere returned, 
although some of them came in raised pitch. 
A trumpet sounded ten times near Glasgow, 
Scotland, and the ten notes were all repeated, 



186 



Life's Echoes, 



but a third lower. And the spiritual law cor- 
responds with the natural world. What we 
do of good or bad may not come back to us in 
just the proportion we expect it, but come 
back it will ; it may be from a higher glad- 
ness than we thought, or from a deeper woe, 
from a mightier conqueror or from a worse 
captive, from a higher throne or deeper dun- 
geon. Our prayer or our blasphemy, our 
kindness or our cruelty, our faith or our un- 
belief, our holy life or our dissolute behavior, 
will come back somehow. Suppose the boss 
of a factory or the head of a commercial firm, 
some day comes out among his clerks or em- 
ployees, and putting his thumbs in the arm- 
holes of his vest, says, with an air of swagger 
and jocosity, " Well, I don't believe in the 
Bible or the church. The one is an imposi- 
tion and the other is full of hypocrites. I de- 
clare I would not trust one of those very 
pious people further than I could see him." 
That is all he says, but he has said enough. 



Life's Echoes. 



187 



The young men go back to their counters or 
their shuttles, and say within themselves, 
1 1 Well, he is a successful man and has prob- 
ably studied up the whole subject and is prob- 
ably right. 1 1 That one lying utterance against 
Bibles and churches has put five young men 
on the wrong track, and though the influential 
man had spoken only in half jest, the echo 
will come back to him in five ruined life- 
times and five destroyed eternities. You see 
the echoes are an octave lower than he antici- 
pated. On the other hand, some rainy day, 
when there are hardly any customers, the 
Christian merchant comes out from his count- 
ing-room and stands among the young men, 
who have nothing to do, and says, " Well, 
boys, this is a dull day, but it will clear off 
after a while. There are a good many ups 
and downs in business, but there is an over- 
ruling Providence. Years ago I made up my 
mind to trust God and He has always seen me 
through. 1 1 About noon the rain ceases and 



188 



Life's Echoes, 



the sun comes out and the clerks go to their 
places, and they say within themselves, 
"Well, he is a successful merchant, and I 
guess he knows what he is talking about, and 
the Christian religion must be a good thing. 
God knows I want some help in this battle 
with temptation and sin." The successful 
merchant who uttered the kind words did not 
know how much good he was doing, but the 
echo will come back in five lifetimes of virtue 
and usefulness, and five Christian death-beds, 
and five heavens. From all the mountains 
of rapture and all the mountains of glory and 
all the mountains of eternity, he will catch 
" the sounding again of the mountains." 

Our own eternity will be a reverberation of 
our own earthly lifetime. What we are here 
we shall be there, only on a larger scale. Dis- 
solution will tear down the body and embank 
it, but our faculties of mind and soul will go 
right on without the hesitancy of a moment 
and without any change except enlargement 



Life's Echoes. 



189 



and intensification. There will be no more 
difference than between a lion behind the iron 
bars and a lion escaped into the field, between 
an eagle in a cage and an eagle in the sky. 
Good here, good there; bad here, bad there. 
Time is only a bedwarfed eternity. Eternity 
is only an enlarged time. In this life our 
soul is in dry dock. The moment we leave 
this life we are launched for our great voyage, 
and we sail on for centuries quintillion, but 
the ship does not change its fundamental 
structure after it gets out of a dry dock • it 
does not pass from brig to schooner, or from 
schooner to man-of-war. What we are when 
launched from this world, we shall be in the 
world to come. 



Crooked Thinqs Made Jtraiqht. 



mUCH of the wealth of the world is in 
the hands of the profligate, while 
many of the best people are subjected to dis- 
tressing privation ; and there is going to be 
a redistribution of property. If it were pos- 
sible, it would be a bad thing to have things 
divided equally. Some men are able to en- 
dure more success than others, and prosperity 
that might not unbalance you might destroy 
me. The Declaration of American Independ- 
ence declares that all men are born equal, but 
the opposite is the truth, for they are born 
unequal. In no respect is this more evident 
than in their capacity to endure success, finan- 
cial or social. I hare seen men by the acqui- 
sition of fifty thousand dollars made arrogant 
and overbearing, and I have known others 
with their millions of dollars child-like and 
(190) 



Crooked Things Made Straight. 191 

unassuming and Christian. We should all be 
affluent, but the Iyord cannot trust us. I am 
glad there are those He can trust. Much is 
said against capitalists, but the world would 
be a very shaky world without them. Who 
built the great railroads which, while they 
give such facilities of travel, employ tens of 
thousands of laborers, supporting them and 
their families ? Capitalists. Who built great 
ships that stir the rivers and bridge the ocean ? 
Capitalists. Who reared the thousands of 
factories all over the land, in which hundreds 
of thousands of employees earn their daily 
bread ? Capitalists. Who endowed your col- 
leges, and opened free libraries, and built asy- 
lums for the orphan, the crippled, and the in- 
sane ? Capitalists. But for them there would 
not be an Academy of Music, or a picture 
gallery, or a free library, or a steamboat, or a 
railroad in America. Who put the world on 
seventy-five years beyond what it would have 
been in enterprise, in comforts, in educational 



192 Crooked Things Made Straight, 

advantage, in good things without number? 
Capitalists. The more money a man gets the 
better, if it come honestly and is employed 
righteously. Nevertheless we all see that 
there needs to be a redistribution of property. 
Communism proposes to make that distribu- 
tion by torch and dagger and dynamite. 
Throw the midnight express train off the track 
and put the factory into conflagration. Dis- 
rupt society. Burglarize. Assassinate. Such 
people believe neither in God nor man nor 
woman, and they know how to make things 
worse but never have made and never can 
make anything better. 

I tell you how there will come a redistribu- 
tion of property: good people will get more 
alertness and acumen and assiduity. Many 
good people are kept in straitened circum- 
stances because they have been indolent, or 
lacked courage to take honest advantage of 
circumstances, and were too stupid to get on. 
With the very same surroundings others went 



Crooked Things Made Straight. 193 

on to competency. In the better days to come 
good men will have their faculties wakened, 
and will in consequence rise to larger share of 
prosperity. On the other hand, estates wrong- 
fully accumulated will dissolve. If not the 
sons, then the grandsons will make the 
money fly, and it will gradually scatter in 
their hands, and become a part of the general 
wealth. Then, as to vast properties right- 
eously gathered — and there are thousands of 
them — such estates will contribute toward 
helping the unfortunate, not more by charities 
than by helping struggling people into lucra- 
tive business, and the man who has amassed 
enough and a surplus will say, li There is a 
young merchant without any capital, I will 
start him on Fulton street ; ' 1 and, ' 1 There is a 
young mechanic who has no means of his own, 
and I will put him on the career of prosper- 
ity ; M and, " There is a farmer with too big a 
mortgage on his land, and I will help him 
lift the encumbrance. n The fact is that if 
13 



194 Crooked Things Made Straight. 

the kindliness and generosity manifested by 
moneyed men toward the struggling during 
the last fifty years, increases in the same ratio 
for the next fifty years, there will be a condi- 
tion of society paradisiac. We are going to have 
a multiplication of William E. Dodges, and 
Peter Coopers, and James L,enoxes, and George 
Peabodys. So will come redistribution, and 
the crooked will be made straight. 

Mind this : God never yet undertook a 
failure. The old book which is worth all 
other books put together, makes it plain that 
God has undertaken to regulate this world 
by Gospel influences, and if He has the power 
He will do what He says He will, and no one 
who amounts to anything will deny His power. 
God has said a hundred times U I will," but 
never once has said, "I cannot." We may 
with our tack-hammers pound away, trying to 
mend and improve and straighten the finan- 
cial condition of the world, and be disap- 
pointed in the result, because our arm is too 



Crooked Things Made Straight. 195 

weak and the hammer we wield too small, 
but the most defiant difficulty will flatten 
and disappear when God with a hammer made 
of summer thunderbolts strikes it, saying, 
u The crooked shall be made straight. n 

In your business concerns there are influ- 
ences perplexing. Your affairs may seem all 
right to outsiders, for business firms do not ad- 
vertise their private troubles, but where one 
firm has even-thing just as they want it, there 
are a hundred firms at their wit's end what to 
do with that partner who draws more than his 
share of the profits, or with that stockholder 
who comes in just often enough to upset 
things, or with that disappearance of funds 
which you cannot account for, although you 
have suspicions you cannot mention ; or with 
that investment which was made contrary to 
your judgment because there was a determina- 
tion to push it through, or because you are 
going behind month by month without any 
prospect of extrication. The trouble is put- 



196 Crooked Things Made Straight 

ting a wrinkle on your forehead that ought 
not to appear there for ten years yet, and you 
will be forty years old when you ought to be 
only thirty, or sixty when you ought to be fifty, 
or seventy when you ought to be only sixty. 
Stop worrying. Either by the dissolution of 
that firm, or by readjusting matters you will 
be brought safely through if you put your 
trust in God. When commercial houses fail 
the suspension is advertised, but of the tens 
of thousands of men who are every day ex- 
tricated no public mention is made. Yester- 
day was Saturday, and I warrant that at the 
windows of banks and in counting-rooms of 
stores and on every street of every city, God 
appeared for the deliverance of good men, as 
certainly as when with His right foot He trod 
Lake Galilee into placidity and made Daniel 
as safe among the lions as though they had 
been house-dogs asleep on a rug before a win- 
ter's fire. 

I never yet asked God to do anything but 



Crooked Thi?igs Made Straight. 197 

He did it, if it were best, and in all the cases 
where my prayer has not been answered, I 
have found out afterward that it was best not 
to have been answered in my way. But none 
of us have tested the full power of prayer. It 
is a force very like some of the forces of na- 
ture, that were in existence but not employed. 
For ages electricity was thought good for 
nothing but to burn barns and kill people 
with fell stroke. The lightning rod on the 
top of houses was the spear with which the 
world charged on the thunderstorm, as much 
as to say, i 1 If you dare to come this way I will 
hurl you into the ground. ? 1 But now electri- 
city lightens homes, and churches, and cities, 
and Christendom, and moves rail cars, and he 
is a rash man who mentions anything as im- 
possible to this natural energy. So the power 
of prayer was to the world rather a frightful 
power, if it was any power at all. But that 
has been changed, and men begin to use it in 
some things, and the time will come when it 



198 Crooked Things Made Straight, 

will be used in all things, and there will be a 
Bible in every counting-room and supplication 
will ascend from every commercial establish- 
ment ; and when business firms are formed the 
question will not only be asked as to how 
much this one and that one put in of capital, 
but the question will be asked, ' 1 Do you 
know how to pray?" Mightier agent than 
any natural force yet developed will be this 
Gospel electricity, flashing heavenward for 
help, flashing earthward with Divine response. 
God in business life. God in agricultural life. 
God in mechanical life. God in artistic life. 
God in every kind of life. Your religion for 
the most part is hung up so high you cannot 
reach it. It is hung up on the cloudy rafters 
of the sky, where you expect to snatch it up 
as you finally go through for heavenly resi- 
dence. Oh, have your religion within easy 
reach now ! Religion is not for heaven, but 
for this world. Once in heaven, we shall need 
no prayer for we shall have everything we 



Crooked Things Made Straight, 199 



want. We shall need no repentance, for we 
shall have forever got rid of our sins. We 
shall have no need of comfort, for there 
will be no trouble. The Christian religion is 
not for heaven where everything is all right, 
but for this world where so many things are 
all wrong. 



Blessed Ls Death. 



ONE of the grandest and mightiest mercies 
of the earth is our divine permission to 
quit it. Sixty-four persons every minute step 
off this planet. Thirty million people every 
year board this planet. As a steamer must 
unload before it takes another cargo, and as 
the passengers of a rail train must leave it in 
order to have another company of passengers 
enter it, so with this world. What would 
happen to an ocean steamer if a man, taking 
a stateroom, should stay in it forever ? What 
would happen to a rail train if one who pur- 
chases a ticket should always occupy the seat 
assigned him ? And what would happen to 
this world if all who came into it never de- 
parted from it ? The grave is as much a bene- 
diction as the cradle. Suppose that all the 
people that have lived since the days of Adam 
(200) 



Blessed Is Death. 



201 



and Eve were still alive, what a cluttered up 
place this world would be ; no elbow room, 
no place to walk, no privacy, nothing to eat 
or wear, or if anything were left, the human 
race would, like a shipwrecked crew, have to 
be put on small rations, each of us having 
perhaps only a biscuit a day. And what 
chance would there be for the rising genera- 
tions? The men and women who started 
when the world started would keep the mod- 
ern people back and down, saying, 1 4 We are 
six thousand years old. Bow down. History 
is nothing, for we are older than history." 
What a mercy for the human race was death. 
Within a few years you can get from this 
world all there is in it. After you have had 
fifty or sixty or seventy spring-times, you have 
seen enough blossoms. After fifty or sixty or 
seventy autumns you have seen enough of 
gorgeous foliage. After fifty or sixty or 
seventy winters, you have seen enough snow 
storms and felt enough chills and wrapped 



202 



Blessed Is Death. 



yourself in enough blankets. In the ordinary 
length of human life you have carried enough 
burdens, and shed enough tears, and suffered 
enough injustices, and felt enough pangs, and 
been clouded by enough doubts. We talk 
about the shortness of life, but if we exercised 
good sense we should realize that life is quite 
long enough. If we are the children of God, 
we are at a banquet, and this world is only 
the first course of the food, and we ought to 
be glad that there are other and better and 
richer courses of food to be handed on. We 
are here in one room of our Father's house, 
but there are rooms up-stairs. They are better 
pictured, better upholstered, better furnished. 
Why do we want to stay in the ante-room 
forever, when there are palatial apartments 
waiting for our occupancy ? What a mercy 
that there is a limitation to earthly environ- 
ments ! 

Death also makes room for improved physi- 
cal machinery. Our bodies have wondrous 



Blessed Is Death. 



203 



powers, but they are very limited. There are 
beasts that can outran us, outlift us, outcarry 
us. The birds have both the earth and air 
for travel, yet we must stick to the one. In 
this world, which the human race takes for 
its own, there are creatures of God that far 
surpass us in some things. Death removes 
this slower and less adroit machinery and 
makes room for something better. These eyes 
that can see half a mile will be removed for 
those that can see from world to world. These 
ears, which can hear a sound a few feet off, 
will be removed for ears that can hear from 
zone to zone. These feet will be removed for 
powers of locomotion swifter than the rein- 
deer's hoof, or eagle's plume, or lightning's 
flash. Then, we have only five senses and to 
these we are shut up. Why only five senses ? 
Why not fifty, why not one hundred, why not 
a thousand ? We can have, and we shall have 
them, but not until this present physical ma- 
chinery is put out of the way. Do not think 



204 Blessed Is Death. 



that tliis body is the best that God can do for 
us. God did not half try when he contrived 
your bodily mechanism. Mind you, I believe 
with all anatomists and all physiologists and 
with all scientists and with the Psalmist that 
"we are fearfully and wonderfully made." 
But, I believe and I know that God can and 
will get us better physical equipment. Is it 
possible for man to make improvement in al- 
most anything and God not be able to make 
improvements in man's physical machinery? 
Shall canal boat give way to limited express 
train ? Shall slow letter give place to tele- 
graphy, that places San Francisco and New 
York within a minute of communication? 
Shall the telephone take the sound of a voice 
sixty miles and instantly bring back another 
voice, and God, who made the man who does 
these things, not be able to improve the man 
himself with infinite velocities and infinite 
multiplication ? Beneficent Death .comes in 
and makes the necessary removal to make way 
for these supernatural improvements. 



Blessed Is Death. 



205 



So also the slow process we now possess of 
getting information must have a substitute. 
Through prolonged study we learned the al- 
phabet, and then we learned to spell, and then 
we learned to read. Then the book is put 
before us, and the eye travels from word to 
word and from page to page, and we take 
whole days to read the book, and, if from that 
book of four or five hundred pages, we have 
gained one or two profitable ideas, we feel we 
have done well. There must be some swifter 
way and more satisfactory way of taking in 
God's universe of thoughts and facts and 
emotions and information. But this cannot 
be done with your brain in its present state. 
Many a brain gives way under the present 
facility. This whitish mass in the upper 
cavity of the skull, and at the extremity of 
the nervous system — this centre of perception 
and sensation cannot endure more than it 
now endures. But God can make a better 
brain, and he sends Death to remove this in- 



206 



Blessed Is Death, 



ferior brain that he may put in a superior 
brain. "Well," you say, "does not that 
destroy the idea of a resurrection of the 
present body?" Oh, no. It will be the old 
factory with new machinery, new driving 
wheel, new bands, new levers, and new 
powers. Don't you see ? So I suppose the 
dullest human brain after the resurrectionary 
process will have more knowledge, more 
acuteness, more brilliancy, more breadth of 
swing than any Sir William Hamilton or 
Herschel or Isaac Newton or Faraday or 
Agassiz ever had in the mortal state, or all 
their intellectual powers combined. You see 
God has only just begun to build you. The 
palace of your nature has only the foundation 
laid, and part of the lower story, and only 
part of one window, but the great architect 
has made His draft of what you will be when 
the Alhambra is completed. Blessed be death ! 
for it removes all the hindrances. And who 
has not all his life run against hindrances? 



Blessed Is Death. 



207 



We cannot go far up or far down. If we go 
far up we get dizzy, and if we go far down, 
we get suffocated. If men would go high up 
they ascend the Matterhorn or Mont Blanc or 
Himalaya, but what disasters have been re- 
ported as they came tumbling down. Or, if 
they went down too far, hark to the explosion 
of the fire-damps, and see the disfigured bodies 
of the poor miners at the bottom of the coal 
shaft 

Then there are the climatic hindrances. 
We run against unpropitious weather of 
all sorts, winter blizzard and summer 
scorch, and each season seems to hatch a 
brood of its own disorders. The summer 
spreads its wings and hatches out fevers and 
sun-strokes, and spring and autumn spread 
their wings and hatch out malarias, and win- 
ter spreads its wings and hatches out pneumo- 
nias and Russian grippes, and the climate of 
this world is a hindrance which every man 
and woman and child has felt. Death is to 



208 



Blessed Is Death, 



the good transference to superior weather : 
weather never fickle, and never too cold and 
never too hot and never too light and never 
too dark. Have you any doubt that God can 
make better weather than is characteristic of 
this planet ? Blessed is death ! for it pre- 
pares the way for change of zones, yea, it 
clears the path to a semi-omnipresence. How 
often we want to be in different places at the 
same time. How perplexed we get being 
compelled to choose between invitations, be- 
tween weddings, between friendly groups, be- 
tween three or four places we would like to be 
in the same morning or the same noon or the 
same evening. While death may not open 
opportunity to be in many places at the same 
time, so easy and so quick and so instanta- 
neous will be the transference that it will 
amount to about the same thing. Quicker 
than I can speak this sentence you will be 
among your glorified kindred, among the mar- 
tyrs, among the apostles, in the gate, on the 



Blessed Is Death. 



209 



battlements, at the temple, and now from 
world to w r orld as soon as a robin hops from 
one tree branch to another tree branch. Dis- 
tance no hindrance. Immensity easily com- 
passed. Semi-omnipresence! "But," says 
some one, 1 1 1 cannot see how God is going to 
reconstruct my body in the Resurrection. ' ' Oh, 
that will be very easy as compared with what 
he has already done with your body four or six 
or ten times. All scientists tell us that the 
human bodv changes entirely once in seven 
years, so that if you are twenty-eight years of 
age you have now your fourth body. If you 
are forty-two years of age you have had six 
bodies. If you are seventy years of age 
you have had ten bodies. Do you not, 
my unbelieving friend, think if God could 
build for you four or five or ten bodies he 
could really build for you one more to be 
called the resurrection body ? Ay ! to make 
that resurrection body will not require half as 
much ingenuity and power as those other bod- 
14 



210 



Blessed Is Death. 



ies you have had. Is it not easier for a sculp- 
tor to make a statue out of silent clay than it 
would be to make a statue out of some mater- 
ial that is alive and moving, and running 
hither and thither ? Will it not be easier for 
God to make the resurrection body out of the 
silent dust of the crumbled body than it was 
to make your body over five or six or eight 
times while it was in motion, walking, climb- 
ing, falling, or rising? God has already on 
your four or five bodies bestowed ten times 
more omnipotence than He will put upon the 
resurrection body. Yea, we have the founda- 
tion for the resurrection body in us now. Sur- 
geons and physiologists say there are parts of 
the human body the uses of which they cannot 
understand. They are searching what these 
parts were made for, but have not found out. 
I can tell them. They are the preliminaries 
of the resurrection body. God does not 
make anything for nothing. The uses of 
those now surplus parts of the body will be 



Blessed Is Death. 



211 



demonstrated when the glorified form is con- 
structed. 

Now, if Death clears the way for all this, 
why paint him as a hobgoblin ? Why call him 
the King of Terrors ? Why think of him as 
a great spook ? Why sketch him with skele- 
ton and arrows, and standing on a bank of 
dark waters ? Why have children so 
frightened at his name that they dare not go 
to bed alone, and old men have their teeth 
chatter lest some shortness of breath hand 
them over to the monster ? All the ages have 
been busy in maligning Death, hurling 
repulsive metaphors at Death, slandering 
Death. Oh, for the sweet breath of Easter 
to come down on the earth. Right after the 
vernal equinox, and when the flowers are be- 
ginning to bloom, well may all nations 
with song, and congratulation, and garlands 
celebrate the resurrection, and our own resur- 
rection when Time is gone by and the trum- 
pets pour through the flying clouds the har- 



212 



Blessed Is Death, 



monies that shall wake the dead. By the 
empty niche of Joseph's mausoleum, by the 
rocks that parted to let the Lord come 
through, let our ideas of changing worlds be 
forever revolutionized. If what I have been 
saying is true, how differently we ought to 
think of our friends departed. The body 
they have put off is only as when entering a 
hall lighted and resounding with musical 
bands, you leave your hat and cloak in the 
cloak-room. What would a banqueter do if 
he had to carry those encumbrances of ap- 
parel with him into the brilliant reception ? 
What would your departed do with their bod- 
ies if they had to be encumbered with them 
in the King's drawing-room ? Gone into the 
light ! Gone into the music ! Gone into the 
festivity ! Gone among kings and queens and 
conquerors ! Gone to meet the kindred who 
preceded them ! Why I should not wonder 
if they had a larger family group there than 
they ever had here. Oh ! how many of them 



Blessed Is Death. 



213 



have got together again. Your father and 
mother went years apart, but they have got to- 
gether, and their children that went years ago 
got together again. Gone where they have 
more room ! Gone where they have more 
jubilant society ! Gone where they have 
mightier capacity to love you than when they 
were here ! Gone out of hindrances into un- 
bounded liberty ! Gone out of January into 
June ! Gone where they talk about you as we 
always talk about absent friends, and say, 11 1 
wonder when they will come up here to join 
us. Hark ! the outside door of heaven swings 
open. Hark ! there are feet on the golden 
stairs. Perhaps they are coming ! M 

We should trust the Lord and be thrilled 
with the fact that our own day of escape 
coineth. If our lives were going to end when 
our heart ceased to pulsate and our lungs to 
breathe, I would want to take ten million 
years of life here for the first installment. 
But, my Christian friends, we cannot afford 



214 



Blessed Is Death , 



always to stay down in the cellar of our Father's 
house. We cannot always be postponing the 
best things. We cannot always be tuning our 
violins for the celestial orchestra. We must 
get our wings out. We must mount. We 
cannot afford always to stand out here in the 
vestibule of the house of many mansions, 
while the windows are illuminated with the 
levee angelic, and we can hear the laughter 
of those forever free, and the ground quakes 
with the bounding feet of those who have 
entered upon eternal play. Ushers of heaven, 
open the gates ! Swing them clear back on 
their pearly hinges ! L,et the celestial music 
rain on us its cadences. I^et the hanging gar- 
dens of the King breathe on us their aromatics. 
L,et our redeemed ones just look out and give 
us one glance of their glorified faces. 



The Qreat Homestead. 



t^EARLY all the Bible descriptions of 
heaven may be figurative. I am not 
positive that in all heaven there is a literal 
crown or harp or pearly gate or throne or 
chariot. They may be used only to illustrate 
the glories of the place, but how well they do 
it! The favorite symbol by which the Bible 
presents celestial happiness is a house. Paul, 
who never owned a house, although he hired 
one for two years in Italy, speaks of heaven 
as a u house not made with hands," and 
Christ in a familiar passage, the translation of 
which is a little changed, so as to give the 
more accurate meaning, says, " In my Father's 
house are many rooms. ' J 

This comparison of heaven to a great home- 
stead of large accommodations I propose to 
carry out. In some healthy neighborhood a 

(215) 



216 The Great Homestead. 



man builds a very commodious habitation. 
He must have room for all his children. The 
rooms come to be called after the different 
members of the family. That is mother's 
room. That is George's room. That is 
Henry's room. That is Flora's room. That 
is Mary's room. And the house is all occu- 
pied. But time goes by, and the sons go out 
into the world, and build their own homes; 
and the daughters are married, or have talent 
enough singly to go out and do a good work 
in the world. After a while the father and 
mother are almost alone in the big house, and 
seated by the evening stand, they say, ( ( Well, 
our family is no larger now than when we 
started together forty years ago. ' ' But time 
goes still further by, and some of the children 
are unfortunate, and return to the old home- 
stead to live, and the grandchildren come with 
them, and, perhaps, great-grandchildren, and 
again the house is full. Millennia ago God 
built on the hills of heaven a great homestead 



The Great Homestead. 



217 



for a family innumerable, yet to be. At first 
He lived alone in that great house, but after a 
while it was occupied by a very large family, 
cherubic, seraphic, angelic. The eternities 
passed on, and many of the inhabitants be- 
came wayward, and left never to return. And 
many of the apartments were vacated. I refer 
to the fallen angels. Now these apartments 
are filling up again. There are arrivals at the 
old homestead of God's children every day, 
and the day will come when there will be no 
unoccupied room in all the house. 

As you and I expect to enter it and make 
there eternal residence, I thought you would 
like to get some more particulars about that 
many-roomed homestead. " In my Father's 
house are many rooms. ' ' You see the place 
is to be apportioned off into apartments. We 
shall love all who are in heaven, but there are 
some very good people whom we would not 
want to live with in the same room. They 
may be better than we are, but they are of a 



218 



The Great Homestead. 



divergent temperament. We should like to 
meet with them on the golden streets, and 
worship with them in the temple, and walk 
with them on the river-banks, but I am glad 
to say that we shall live in different apart- 
ments. "In my Father's house are many 
rooms. " You see, heaven will be so large 
that if one want an entire room to himself or 
herself, it can be afforded. 

An ingenious statistician, taking the state- 
ment made in Revelation, twenty-first chapter, 
that the heavenly Jerusalem was measured and 
found to be twelve thousand furlongs, and that 
the length and height and breadth of it are 
equal, says that would make heaven in size 
948 sextillion, 988 quintillion cubic feet; and 
then reserving a certain portion for the court 
of heaven and the streets, and estimating that 
the world may last a hundred thousand years, 
he ciphers out that there are over five trillion 
rooms, each room seventeen feet long, sixteen 
feet wide, fifteen feet high. But I have no 



The Great Homestead, 



219 



faith in the accuracy of that calculation. He 
makes the rooms too small. From all I can 
read the rooms will be palatial, and those who 
have not had enough room in this world will 
have plenty of room at the last. The fact is, 
that most people in this world are crowded, 
and though out on a vast prairie or in a moun- 
tain district people may have more room than 
they want, in most cases it is house built close 
to house, and the streets are crowded, and the 
cradle is crowded by other cradles, and the 
graves crowded in the cemetery by other 
graves, and one of the richest luxuries of 
many people in getting out of this world will 
be the gaining of unhindered and uncramped 
room. And I should not wonder if, instead of 
the room that the statistician ciphered out as 
only seventeen feet by sixteen, it should be 
larger than any of the rooms at the palace in 
Berlin, in St. James, or in the Winter Palace. 

Let us join hands and go up to this majestic 
homestead and see for ourselves. As we ascend 



220 



The Great Homestead, 



the golden steps an invisible guardsman swings 
open the front door, and we are ushered to 
the right into the reception-room of the old 
homestead. That is the place where we first 
meet the welcome of heaven. There must be 
a place where the departed spirit enters, and 
a place in which it confronts the inhabitants 
celestial. The reception-room of the newly 
arrived from this world — what scenes it must 
have witnessed since the first guest arrived, the 
victim of the first fratricide, pious Abel! In 
that room Christ lovingly greeted all new- 
comers. He redeemed them, and He has the 
right to the first embrace on their arrival. 
What a minute when the ascended spirit first 
sees the L,ord! Better than all we ever read 
about Him, or talked about Him, or sang 
about Him in all the churches and through 
all our earthly lifetime, will it be, just for one 
second to see Him. The most rapturous idea 
we ever had of Him on sacramental days or 
at the height of some great revival, or under 



The Great Homestead, 



221 



the uplifted baton of an oratorio are a bank- 
ruptcy of thought compared with the first 
flash of His appearance in that reception-room. 
At that moment when you confront each other, 
Christ looking upon you, and you looking 
upon Christ, there will be an ecstatic thrill 
and surging of emotion that beggars all de- 
scription. Look! They need no introduction. 
Long ago Christ chose that repentant sinner, 
and that repentant sinner chose Christ. 
Mightiest moment of an immortal history — 
the first kiss of heaven ! Jesus and the soul ; 
the soul and Jesus. 

But now into that reception-room pour the 
glorified kinsfolk. Enough of earthly reten- 
tion to let you know them, but without their 
wounds or their sicknesses or their troubles. 
See what heaven has done for them ! So radi- 
ant, so gleeful, so transportingly lovely! They 
call you by name ; they greet you with an 
ardor proportioned to the anguish of your 
parting and the length of your separation. 



222 



The Great Homestead. 



Father! Mother! There is your child. Sisters! 
Brothers! Friends! I wish you joy. For years 
apart, together again in the reception-room of 
the old homestead. You see, they will know 
you are coming. There are so many immor- 
tals filling all the spaces between here and 
heaven that news like that flies like lightning. 
They will be there in an instant, though they 
were in some other world on errand from God, 
a signal would be thrown that would fetch 
them. Though you might at first feel dazed 
and overawed at their supernal splendor, all 
that feeling will be gone at their first touch 
of heavenly salutation, and we shall say, • 4 O 
my lost boy!" u O my lost companion !" " O 
my lost friend, are we here together ?" What 
scenes in that reception-room of the old home- 
stead have been witnessed ! There met Joseph 
and Jacob, finding it a brighter room than 
anything they saw in Pharaoh's palace; David 
and the little child for whom he once fasted 
and wept; Mary and Lazarus after the heart- 



The Great Homestead. 



223 



break of Bethany; Timothy and grandmother 
Lois; Isabella Graham and her sailor son. 
Alfred and George Cookman, the mystery of 
the sea at last made manifest; Luther and 
Magdalen, the daughter he bemoaned; John 
Howard and the prisoners whom he gospelized; 
and multitudes without number who once so 
weary and so sad, parted on earth but glori- 
ously met in heaven. Among all the rooms 
of that house there is no one that more enrap- 
tures my soul than that reception-room. 

Another room in our Father's house is the 
throne room. We belong to the royal family. 
The blood of King Jesus flows in our veins, 
so we have a right to enter the throne room. 
It is no easy thing on earth to get through 
even the outside door of a king's residence. 
During the Franco-German war, one eventide 
in tlte summer of 1870, I stood studying the 
exquisite sculpturing of the gate of the Tuile- 
ries, Paris. Lost in admiration of the wonder- 
ful art of that gate, I knew not that I was 



224 



The Great Homestead. 



exciting suspicion. Lowering my eyes to the 
crowds of people, I found myself being closely 
inspected by governmental officials, who from 
my complexion judged me to be a German, 
and that for some belligerent purpose I might 
be examining the gates of the palace. My 
explanations in very poor French did not 
satisfy them, and they followed me long dis- 
tances until I reached my hotel, and were not 
satisfied until from my landlord they found 
that I was only an inoffensive American. The 
gates of earthly palaces are carefully guarded, 
and, if so, how much more the throne room! 
A dazzling place is it for mirrors and all costly 
art. No one who ever saw the throne room of 
the first and only Napoleon will ever forget the 
letter N embroidered in purple and gold on the 
upholstery of chair and window, the letter N 
gilded on the wall, the letter N chased on the 
chalices, the letter N flaming from the ceiling. 
What a conflagration of brilliance the throne 
room of Charles Immanuel of Sardinia^ of 
Ferdinand of Spain, of Elizabeth of England, 
of Boniface of Italy! But the throne room 
of our Father's house hath a glory eclipsing 
all the throne rooms that ever saw sceptre 



The Great Homestead, 225 



wave, or crown glitter, or foreign ambassador 
bow, for our Father's throne is a throne of 
grace, a throne of mercy, a throne of holiness, 
a throne of justice, a throne of universal 
dominion. We need not stand shivering and 
cowering before it, for our Father says we may 
yet one day come up and sit on it beside Him. 
4 * To him that overcometh will I grant to sit 
with me in my throne. " You see we are 
princes and princesses. Perhaps now we move 
about incognito, as Peter the Great in the garb 
of a ship carpenter at Amsterdam, or as Queen 
Tirzah in the dress of a peasant woman seek- 
ing the prophet for her child's cure; but it will 
be found out after a while who we are when 
we shall get into the throne room. 

St. John and other Bible writers talk so 
much about- the music of heaven that there 
must be music there, perhaps not such as on 
earth was thrummed from trembling string or 
evoked by touch of ivory key, but if not that, 
then something better. There are so many 
Christian harpists and Christian composers 
and Christian organists and Christian choris- 
ters and Christian hymnologists that have 
gone up from earth, there must be for 

15 



226 



The Great Homestead. 



them some place of especial delectation. 
Shall we have music in this world of discords, 
and no music in the land of complete harmony ? 
I cannot give you the notes of the first bar of 
the new song that is sung in heaven ; I cannot 
imagine either the solo or the doxology. But 
heaven means music, and can mean nothing 
else. Occasionally that music has escaped the 
gate. Dr. Puller dying at Beaufort, S. C, 
said, " Do you not hear? " " Hear what? " 
exclaimed the bystanders. ' 4 The music ! 
Ivift me up ! Open the window ! " In that 
music room of our Father's house, you will 
some day meet the old masters, Mozart and 
Handel and Mendelssohn and Beethoven ; and 
Doddridge, whose sacred poetry was as re- 
markable as his sacred prose ; and James 
Montgomery, and William Cowper, at last got 
rid of his spiritual melancholy ; and Bishop 
Heber, who sang of " Greenland's icy moun- 
tains and India's coral strand;" and Dr. 
Raffles, who wrote of ' 4 High in yonder realms 
of light ; ' ' and Isaac Watts, who went to visit 
Sir Thomas Abney and wife for a week, but 
proved himself so agreeable a guest that they 
made him stay thirty-six years ; and side by 



The Great Homestead. 227 



side, Augustus Toplady, who has got over his 
dislike for the Methodists ; and Charles Wesley, . 
freed from his dislike for Calvinists ; and 
George W. Bethune, as sweet as a song maker as 
he was great as a preacher, and the author of 
1 4 The Village Hymns ; ' ' and many who wrote 
in verse or song, in church or by eventide 
cradle ; and many who were passionately fond 
of music but could make none themselves. 
The poorest singer there more than any earthly 
prima donna, and the poorest players there 
more than any earthly Gottschalk. Oh, that 
music room, the headquarters of cadence and 
rh\'thm, symphony and chant, psalm and anti- 
phon ! May we be there some hour when 
Haydn sits at the keys of one of his own ora- 
torios, and David, the psalmist, fingers the 
harp, and Miriam of the Red Sea banks claps 
the cymbals, and Gabriel puts his lips to the 
trumpet, and the four and twenty elders chant, 
and Lind and Parepa render matchless duet in 
the music room of the old heavenly homestead. 

The family room may correspond some- 
what with the family room on earth. At 
morning and evening, you know r , that is the 
place we now meet. Though each member 



228 The Great Homestead, 



of the household has a separate room, in the 
family room they all gather, and joys and sor- 
rows and experiences of all styles are there 
rehearsed. Sacred room in all our dwellings ! 
whether it be luxurious with ottomans and 
divans, and books in Russian lids standing in 
mahogany case, or there be only a few plain 
chairs and a cradle. So the family room on 
high will be the place where the kinsfolk as- 
semble and talk over the family experiences 
of earth, the weddings, the births, the burials, 
the festal days of Christmas and Thanksgiving 
reunion. Will the children departed remain 
children there ? Will the aged remain aged 
there ? Oh, no ; everything is perfect there. 
The child will go ahead to glorified ma- 
turity, and the aged will go back to glorified 
maturity. The rising sun of the one will rise 
to meridian, and the descending sun of the 
other will return to meridian. However much 
we love our children on earth we should con- 
sider it a domestic disaster if they stayed 
children, and so we rejoice at their growth 
here. And when we meet in the family room 
of our Father's house, we shall be glad that 
they have grandly and gloriously matured ; 



The Great Homestead. 229 



while our parents, who were aged and infirm 
here, we shall be glad to find restored to the 
most agile and vigorous immortality there. If 
forty or forty-five or fifty years be the apex of 
physical and mental life on earth, then the 
heavenly childhood will advance to that, and 
the heavenlv old a^e will retreat to that. 
When we join them in that family room we 
shall have much to tell them. We shall want 
to know of them, right away, such things as 
these : Did you see us in this or that or the 
other struggle ? Did you know when we lost 
our properity, and sympathize with us ? Did 
you know we had that awful sickness ? Were 
you hovering anywhere around us when we 
plunged into that memorable accident ? Did 
you know of our backsliding ? Did you know 
of that moral victor}' ? Were you pleased 
when we started for heaven ? Did you cele- 
brate the hour of our conversion ? And then, 
whether they know it or not, we shall tell them 
all. But they will have more to tell us than 
we to tell them. Ten years on earth ma}' be 
very eventful, but what must be the biography 
of ten years in heaven ? They will have to 
tell us the storv of coronations, storv of news 



230 The Great Homestead. 



from all immensity, story of conquerors and 
hierarchs, story of wrecked or ransomed 
planets, story of angelic victory over diabolic 
revolts, of extinguished suns, of obliterated 
constellations, of new galaxies kindled and 
swung, of stranded comets, of worlds on fire, 
and story of Jehovah's majestic reign. If in 
that family room of our Father's house we 
have so much to tell them of what we have 
passed through since we parted, how much 
more thrilling and arousing that which they 
have to tell us of what they have passed through 
since we parted. Surely that family room will 
be one of the most favored rooms in all our 
Father's house. What long lingering there, 
for we shall never again be in a hurry ! c 1 Let 
me open a window, ' ' said an humble Christian 
servant to Lady Raffles, who, because of the 
death of her child, had shut herself up in a dark 
room and refused to see any one, ' ' you have 
been many days in this dark room. Are you 
not ashamed to grieve in this manner, when 
you ought to be thanking God for having 
given you the most beautiful child that ever 
was seen, and instead of leaving him in this 
world till he should be worn with trouble, has 



The Great Homestead. 



231 



not God taken him to heaven in all his beanty ? 
Leave off weeping, and let me open a window. ' ' 
So to-day I am trying to open upon the dark- 
ness of earthly separation the windows and 
doors and rooms of the heavenly homestead. 

How would it do for my address to leave 
you in that family room to-day ? I am sure 
there is no room in which you would rather 
stay than in the enraptured circle of your 
ascended and glorified kinsfolk. We might visit 
other rooms in our Father's house. There may 
be picture-galleries penciled not with earthly art 
but by some process unknown in this world, 
preserving for the next world the brightest 
and most stupendous scenes of human history. 
And there may be lines and forms of earthly 
beauty preserved for heavenly inspection in 
something whiter and chaster and richer than 
Venetian sculpture ever wrought. Rooms 
beside rooms. Rooms over rooms. Large 
rooms, majestic rooms, opalescent rooms, 
amethystine rooms. " In my Father's house 
are many rooms." 

I hope none of us will be disappointed about 
getting there. There is room for us, if we 
will go and take it, but in order to reach it, it 



232 The Great Homestead. 



is absolutely necessary that we take the right 
way, and Christ is the way ; and we must 
enter at the right door, and Christ is the door ; 
and we must start in time, and the only hour 
you are sure of is the hour the clock now strikes, 
and the only second the one your watch is now 
ticking. I hold in my hand a roll of letters 
inviting you all to make that your home for- 
ever. The New Testament is only a roll of 
letters inviting you, as the spirit of them 
practically says : ' ' My dying, yet immortal 
child in earthly neighborhood, I have built for 
you a great residence. It is full of rooms. I 
have furnished them as no palace was ever 
furnished. Pearls are nothing, emeralds are 
nothing, chrysoprasus is nothing ; illumined 
panels of sunrise and sunset, nothing ; the 
aurora of the northern heavens, nothing- — 
compared with the splendor with which I have 
garnitured them. But you must be clean be- 
fore you can enter there, and so I have opened a 
fountain where you may wash all your sins 
away. Come now ! Put your weary but 
cleansed feet on the upward pathway. Do you 
not see amid the thick foliage on the heavenly 
hill-tops the old family homestead ? " 



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